Speaking of motivation, today’s Orange County Register has a story about a guy who really knows — or knew — how to light a fire under his employees.

According to the story, Woo Sung Park, a landscaping supervisor, told day laborer Ernesto Avalos that he, Avalos, was not pulling his weight on the job. The pep talk so energized Mr. Avalos that he beat Mr. Park to death with a shovel and a pickax.

This happened right here in Irvine! Tragically, one of my rich neighbors is now two men short on his beautification project . . .

Staring your boss in the face and saying June 1 when you know that even a year from June would be optimistic sounds bad. It sounds like lying. But being a Can Do manager sounds good.

— Tom DeMarco, Slack

My wife is commenting on the smell of our son’s hockey bag. “You need to air that out sometimes,” she tells him.

“Hockey players aren’t supposed to smell like perfume,” he explains.

“What are they supposed to smell like?” I ask him.

“Sweat and toil,” he says. “Broken bones. And dried blood.”

Somehow the realization that nothing was to be hoped for had a salutary effect on me. For weeks and months, for years, in fact, all my life I had been looking forward to something happening, some extrinsic event that would alter my life, and now suddenly, inspired by the absolute hopelessness of everything I felt relieved, felt as though a great burden had been lifted from my shoulders.

 

Nothing that had happened to me thus far had been sufficient to destroy me; nothing had been destroyed except my illusions, I myself was intact. The world was intact.

 

If now and then we encounter pages that explode, pages that wound and sear, that wring groans and tears and curses, know that they come from a man with his back up, a man whose only defenses left are his words and his words are always stronger than the lying, crushing weight of the world, stronger than all the racks and wheels which the cowardly invent to crush out the miracle of personality.

My son’s upstairs playing PawnGame as my wife yells up to him, “Didn’t I tell you 15 minutes ago to take a shower?”

“Yes,” he yells back.

“Didn’t you say ‘OK’?”

“No, I said ‘hold on.’”

“Oh . . . must be something wrong with my ears then.”

Real achievement means inevitably a worthy and virtuous task. To do some idiotic job very well is certainly not real achievement. I like my phrasing, “What is not worth doing is not worth doing well.”

— Abraham Maslow

My son’s junior high school has two bands, Symphonic Band and Concert Band. You could think of them as the varsity and the JV. Membership in the Symphonic Band is by audition only.

Because the boy changed instruments from saxophone to percussion last summer, after the Symphonic Band auditions, he has to play in the Concert Band this year.

I don’t think he’s happy about it, but he’s taking lessons and practicing and trying to get better.

This week, we had All-City Honor Band tryouts. All five percussionists from the Symphonic Band tried out, and four of them made it. My son also tried out and made it — as first chair. He’s the best junior high percussionist in Irvine.

Don’t give up on your dreams, kids!

I too played percussion in junior high and high school, where I was known far and wide as the Fast-Hand Mallet Man. So the kid has good genetics, obviously . . .

On this morning’s enterprise IT conference call, one of our project managers announced the successful release of Project Foobar.

Then a woman’s voice — I assume it was the business owner — came on and said, “We had to pull that back out.”

“Is that true?” the PMO manager asked.

The project manager continued on in the same tone as before: “We had to pull it out after release. The customers are using a manual workaround until we resolve the issues.”

Business owners rarely participate in these calls. I assume that had this particular business owner not been on the call, the minor detail about backing out the release would never have been mentioned.

Believe it or not, an argument then ensued regarding whether this could be credited as a successful release, with the additional work considered as “post-release” effort.

Project X hit a milestone called Vision/Scope seven months ago, 99 days late. It’s 312 days late on the current milestone, which is called Definition.

To date, the project has consumed 36,000 labor hours — 18 person-years — and $2.5 million.

At this morning’s enterprise-level status meeting, it was decided that Project X will be put on indefinite hold, as it is no longer a strategic priority.

This reminded me a lot of an article I read a few days ago:

What the waterfall does well is to keep useless projects from resulting in useless code that needs to be maintained. I’m not sure if that’s the real purpose, but it’s certainly a great side benefit. It may sound inefficient to pay a lot of engineers to get started on projects, do a bunch of analysis and design, and finally abandon the whole thing when something else becomes a higher priority, but every line of code they don’t write is another line that can’t break!

OK . . . you could make a case that waterfall “worked” here — clearly if, after 18 years of effort, people can’t even define the project, that sounds like a project that has no chance of success and shouldn’t be attempted — but it worked at a cost of $2.5 million.

That doesn’t seem very efficient.

What I find is that if you put the customer, the technical team and other appropriate representatives together for as little as four to eight hours, à la a Sprint Planning Meeting, it should be obvious whether or not anyone understands the problem well enough to go ahead and attempt a software solution.

Thus spoke The Programmer.

My instant reaction to the 9/11 attacks was that they were a nuisance that got in the way of more pressing concerns. . . . Accepting that fascism is worse than western democracy, even western democracies governed by George W Bush and Tony Blair, sounds very easy in theory, but it is very difficult to do in practice when you are a habitual enemy of the status quo in your own country.

— Mark Cohen, What’s Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way

Inspired by Don Carman’s Reporter Responses, a handy list for the IT professional:

• Good, fast, cheap — pick two.
• It’s not a show-stopper.
• It’s a show-stopper.
• It’s out of scope.
• It’s not rocket science.
• It’s not brain surgery.
• Let’s not reinvent the wheel.
• That sounds doable.
• I could do it myself in a week.
• That’s why I make the big money.
• It works fine on my machine.
• It was working fine 10 minutes ago.
• It’s a best-of-breed solution.
• It’s an enterprise-class solution.
• It’s a state-of-the-art solution.
• It’s an industry standard.
• It’s not one of our core competencies.
• We’re waiting on requirements.
• We’re waiting on design.
• We’re waiting on the vendor.
• We found some issues in testing.
• We’re thinking outside the box.
• Add that to the lessons learned.
• That’s a ballpark estimate.
• I’m working smarter, not harder.
• There are no problems, only opportunities.
• Since when did you become an expert on ____?
• I can’t explain that to my boss.
• I’ll get to it next week.
• We’ll make up the lost time in testing.
• It has to go through change control.
• We moved that to the next release.
• I’ll clean that up later.
• It’s pretty much done.
• It’s 90 percent done.
• It’s done, except for the testing.
• It’s just a one-line fix.
• We have to rewrite it from scratch.
• That’s a training issue.
• That’s not really an issue.
• Have you tried calling the help desk?
• We’re in discovery on that.
• We would have been all right, but the requirements kept changing.
• We have to follow the standard process.
• Let’s do a gap analysis.
• It’s a team effort.

In 1960, Douglas MacGregor of the MIT Sloan School of Management developed two theories of workplace motivation, Theory X and Theory Y.

Theory X assumptions

• People have an inherent dislike for work and will avoid it whenever possible.
• People must be coerced, controlled, directed, or threatened with punishment in order to get them to achieve the organizational objectives.
• People prefer to be directed, do not want responsibility, and have little or no ambition.
• People seek security above all else.

Theory Y assumptions

• Work is as natural as rest or play.
• People will exercise self-control and self-direction in the pursuit of organizational objectives.
• Commitment to objectives is a function of rewards associated with their achievement.
• People usually accept and often seek responsibility.
• Imagination, ingenuity and creativity are widely, not narrowly, distributed in the population.
• The intellectual potential of the average person is only partly utilized.

I come down strongly in favor of Theory Y. I don’t feel like I’m an inherently unmotivated person, that my boss has to keep coming up with new ways to get my head in the game, and I don’t find that most other people do either. People want to do good work. They want the opportunity to do good work.

The key, really, is not to motivate people, but to avoid demotivating them. A lot of managers haven’t figured that one out yet.

This is an excerpt from a job posting for a Sr. IT Project Manager:

• Develop project plans and ensure that deadlines are met on time and projects are delivered within budget constraints. You will use standard project management tools to define requirements and track project status.

• Manage and prioritize projects for the division using standard project planning methods and software through all phases of the project/development lifecycle.

OK, let me get this straight: You want projects delivered on time and within budget — you don’t mention whether or not you want the software to actually work, but I assume you do — and you want it done with standard tools and standard methods.

It may have escaped your attention, but that is not a standard result. The standard IT project is either late or over budget or fails to meet customer expectations, or all three.

If it were possible to deliver high-quality software on time and within budget with standard tools and methods, then everybody would be doing it.

So you want someone to achieve exceptional results — non-standard results — with standard tools and methods. How is that supposed to happen?

I can deliver exceptional results, but you have to let me do it my own way. If I have to use the standard tools and methods, I’ll get the same crappy results everyone else gets.

Thus spoke The Programmer.

Watching George [Foreman] come back to win the title got me all excited. Made me want to come back. But then the next morning came, and it was time to start running. I lay back in bed and said, “That’s okay, I’m still the Greatest.”

— Muhammad Ali

Here’s how I spent the MLK holiday: My son went over to a friend’s house and I stayed home and read a book. When the boy came home, we threw a football around for a while, and then I took Lightning to the dog park, where he fended off an inappropriate advance from a giant black pit bull.

So all in all, a jam-packed day of doing nothing . . .

A friend of mine tells me he doesn’t get a day off for the King holiday. In fact, he doesn’t get another paid holiday until Memorial Day!

HA HA HA! I work for a company in the banking industry. If you work for a bank, you get all the holidays off! In fact, between now and Memorial Day, we get Lincoln’s Birthday, Washington’s Birthday, Groundhog Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Earth Day, Cinco de Mayo and spring break. Plus a floating holiday.

Oh, I almost forgot — National Safe Boating Week.

WOO-HOO!

Identify these two well-known novels from the first and last lines. Answers are in the comments. More lit quizzes here.

Book One

First line

We were using the old blue china and the stainless steel cutlery, with place mats on the big oval table and odd-sized jelly glasses for the wine.

Last line

I said: “It’s the color of the sky.”

Book Two

First line

The insuperable gap between East and West that exists in some eyes is perhaps nothing more than an optical illusion.

Last line

“The only proper action,” Colonel Green agreed.

My son and I are sitting around the house when the phone rings. He looks at the caller ID, which says something about Recruiting.

“It’s the U.S. Army,” he says.

We don’t pick it up, and a female voice comes on to leave a message, which has nothing to do with the army.

“A woman?!” he shouts. “What would Andrew Jackson say about that?”

“Andrew Jackson?”

“That’s right, soldier!”

My wife is talking about the possibility of a Christmastime family trip to Thailand. She’s from Thailand, lived there through college, and still has relatives there.

I’ve never been to Thailand — I hate to travel, for one thing — but our son has been over there with her on a few occasions.

Here’s his reaction, punctuated with frantic screaming:

“AHHHHH! It’s people who can’t speak English in 170-degree heat!”

I don’t think this boy has a future as a travel agent.

“They haven’t seen you in a long time,” my wife tells him.

“Can’t we do a video conference?”

In case you don’t recognize the woman in the painting, it’s Angelina Jolie (as the Virgin Mary) with her kids, hovering in the heavens above a Wal-Mart.

Perhaps most surprising to us has been the degree to which fear appears to be a feature of modern work life. Whenever we talk with others about this work, such as on airplanes with strangers, we get a similar response — “Oh yeah, I can relate to wanting to speak up but biting my tongue.” It’s really a shame how much apparently untapped knowledge there is out there and how much pain and frustration results from this silence. That, too, has been somewhat surprising–that people are genuinely hurt and frustrated about their silence. This suggests that employees aren’t failing to provide ideas or input because they’ve “checked out” and just don’t care, but because of fear.

— “Do I Dare Say Something?,” HBS Working Knowledge

What is happening here? Let’s examine some possibilities:

1. Some people are afraid to speak up under any circumstances and the workplace has nothing to do with it.
2. In some workplaces, speaking up is so obviously unsafe or a waste of time that everyone just keeps their yap shut.

Assuming neither of these conditions holds, people make a decision to speak or hold their tongue based on the specific features of the situation, including a calculation of how what they have to say is likely to affect their job security and/or mobility.

People who don’t care about job security or mobility are therefore able to be more fully engaged in their work, ask questions that need to be asked and say things that need to be said.

Hence the old saying that the effective leader must come to work everyday prepared to lose his or her job . . .