Shared vision as the DNA of an organization . . .

It’s common knowledge that Southwest is a successful company, but there is a shocking performance gap between Southwest and its competitors. Although the airlines industry as a whole has only a passing acquaintance with profitability, Southwest has been consistently profitable for more than thirty years.

The reasons for Southwest’s success could (and do) fill up books, but perhaps the single greatest factor in the company’s success is its dogged focus on reducing costs. Every airline would love to reduce costs, but Southwest has been doing it for decades. For this effort to succeed, the company must coordinate thousands of employees ranging from marketers to baggage handlers.

Southwest has a Commander’s Intent, a core, that helps to guide this coordination. As related by James Carville and Paul Begala:

Herb Kelleher [the longest-serving CEO of Southwest] once told someone, “I can teach you the secret to running this airline in thirty seconds. This is it: We are THE low-cost airline. Once you understand that fact, you can make any decision about this company’s future as well as I can.

“Here’s an example,” he said. “Tracy from marketing comes into your office. She says her surveys indicate that the passengers might enjoy a light entree on the Houston to Las Vegas flight. All we offer is peanuts, and she thinks a nice chicken Caesar salad would be popular. What do you say?”

The person stammered for a moment, so Kelleher responded: “You say, ‘Tracy, will adding that chicken Caesar salad make us THE low-fare airline from Houston to Las Vegas? Because if it doesn’t help us become the unchallenged low-fare airline, we’re not serving any damn chicken salad.’”

Kelleher’s Commander’s Intent is “We are THE low-fare airline.” This is a simple idea, but it is sufficiently useful that it has guided the actions of Southwest’s employees for more than thirty years.

— Chip Heath & Dan Heath, Made to Stick

Instead of “managing” the process in the traditional sense, management can help a lot more by:

• realizing that it is the teams that will discover and make the improvements, not management,
• giving teams the responsibility to manage and improve their own process as well as the freedom and authority to do so,
• establishing an environment that actively encourages teams to be totally honest about their problems and impediments,
• listening to what the teams say they need and respond to those needs,
• observing teams in action instead of just collecting numbers,
• providing useful feedback to teams instead of instructions or pressure.

— Steven Gordon

Many wise people have said that what you put your attention on is what you will create around you. This is true in project management. If you concentrate on meeting the plan and slipping when big problems arise, you will, at best, ship on time, and more likely, you will ship late. . . .

To change your results by changing the way you look at how your team uses time, you must put your attention on how to make tasks take the least time possible. Replace “sticking to the plan” with “looking for ways to decrease the time spent.”

— Michele McCarthy

• We increase return on investment by making continuous flow of value our focus.
• We deliver reliable results by engaging customers in frequent interactions and shared ownership.
• We expect uncertainty and manage for it through iterations, anticipation, and adaptation.
• We unleash creativity and innovation by recognizing that individuals are the ultimate source of value, and creating an environment where they can make a difference.
• We boost performance through group accountability for results and shared responsibility for team effectiveness.
• We improve effectiveness and reliability through situationally specific strategies, processes and practices.

— Declaration of Interdependence

• Always pretend to know more than anybody else
• Police your employees by every procedural means
• Have your professionally-trained staff members do technicians’work for long periods of time
• Erect the highest possible barrier between commercial decision-makers and your technical staff
• Don’t speak to employees on a personal level, except when announcing raises
• Be the exclusive spokesman for everything for which you are responsible
• Say yes to new ideas, but do nothing about them
• Call many meetings
• Put every new idea through channels
• Worry about the budget
• Cultivate the not-invented-here syndrome

— via MIT OpenCourseWare

I took the dog for a walk this morning before dropping my son off at school . . . in theory, the dog is “his” dog, but in practice, I wind up doing most of the work.

As we got back from the walk, the boy was standing outside yelling, “Let’s go! We’re late!”

“Okay, Mr. Doesn’t-Do-Any-Work-While-Barking-Out-Orders-To-Others,” I said.

“That’s what leadership’s all about,” he said.

I was laid off recently by a mortgage bank here in Southern California. Times are tough in the mortgage business, as you may have heard.

First, some tips on how not to do a layoff:

1. Call the layoff a “rightsizing,” which suggests that there was something “wrong” with the people who were let go. (Actually, the company I worked for has already announced another “rightsizing” in which 1,000 more people will be laid off over the next few months. They just can’t get these “rightsizings” right.)

2. Overnight a layoff information packet, including a 20-page severance agreement, to the home of laid-off employees, asking them to sign and return it via the enclosed UPS envelope.

3. Don’t enclose the UPS envelope.

4. The next day, overnight a second packet to employees’ homes, containing the UPS envelope and a letter correcting phone numbers, email addresses and other misinformation in the previous day’s packet.

5. Include an obvious misspelling or two in the letter — ideally, something that would slip past a spell checker but be caught easily by anyone who bothered to proofread it. Suggestion: “If you have nay questions . . .”

Unemployed people like to see the kind of flamboyant incompetence that still draws a paycheck.

Want to hire me?

Here’s what I’m good at:

• Software development
• Project management
• Writing
• Training, coaching and mentoring

Looking for 10 reasons to hire me?

Here they are.

My first 10 years in the software business, I had great managers. They did the management thing and I did the programming thing and we got great results together.

Then, after the dot-com boom torpedoed industry hiring standards, I got tired of working for managers who should not have been allowed anywhere near a software project, people who were not fit to direct a professional software developer to a table at the Olive Garden, much less direct their activities on a complex project.

I couldn’t possibly have continued to work for people like that — it just made a mockery of all the work I’d done over the years to actually learn something — but I still miss being a developer . . .

Thus spoke The Programmer.

Another aspect of respecting people is the idea that the process that the team uses to generate value is owned by the team. The process is what the team uses to achieve its goals. By the time things get formalized, it rapidly morphs into a situation where the team is a tool that the process uses to achieve its goals. That’s rather disrespectful of the individuals involved. It doesn’t leverage their capabilities and strengths and insights.

— Tom Poppendieck

You know what I saw at the bookstore this afternoon? A 35th anniversary edition of Robert Townsend’s Up the Organization!

If I’ve ever read a better business book, I can’t remember what it was. Townsend was way, way ahead of the curve in both style and content . . .

Highly recommended!

One challenge we’re facing is that some high level executives are now concerned over how the project is progressing and want regular updates–they are used to Microsoft Project GANTT charts, excel charts with deadlines and stop lighting (e.g. yellow light, we’re behind schedule but it’s not critical).

How do we map our agile process into the traditional project plans used by upper management for their corporate planning?

— Mark A. Herschberg

At the Deep Agile seminar he and I did, Jeff Sutherland told of being asked for a GANTT chart or such. He asked the execs in question how accurate those charts were. They replied that they were never accurate. He declined to do them.

— Ron Jeffries

In addition to the timely pay for acceptable services he offers, there are a few additional conditions that he imposes on you, if you are one of his subordinates. These are:

1. What actions you take, you believe in.
2. What commitments you make, you keep,
3. What resources you have, you use.
4. What words you say, you believe to be true.
5. What you create, you intend to be great.

 

He knows that if you buy something from an expert, you are wise to let them to deliver it on their own. . . .

He requires that the team credibly believe itself to be doing something great, and also insists that all involved relentlessly pursue - and always adopt - what they think is the best available idea. . . .

He never allows people to say, “People say…” If unidentified “people” have something to say, they can come say it. He listens. He just doesn’t believe in the self-appointed representation of selves not one’s own.

— Jim and Michele McCarthy, “The Perfect Boss”

The halo effect is a cognitive bias whereby people tend to make specific inferences on the basis of a general impression. It was first identified by psychologist Edward Thorndike in 1920.

I read an interesting article this weekend by Phil Rosenzweig, the author of The Halo Effect: … and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers, on the halo effect in the business world:

Imagine a company that is doing well, with rising sales, high profits, and a sharply increasing stock price. The tendency is to infer that the company has a sound strategy, a visionary leader, motivated employees, an excellent customer orientation, a vibrant culture, and so on. But when that same company suffers a decline–if sales fall and profits shrink–many people are quick to conclude that the company’s strategy went wrong, its people became complacent, it neglected its customers, its culture became stodgy, and more. In fact, these things may not have changed much, if at all. Rather, company performance, good or bad, creates an overall impression–a halo–that shapes how we perceive its strategy, leaders, employees, culture, and other elements.

For example, when Cisco Systems was riding high in the late 1990s, it was widely praised for its “brilliant strategy, masterful management of acquisitions, and superb customer focus.” When the tech bubble burst, Cisco was said to have “a flawed strategy, haphazard acquisition management, and poor customer relations.”

Another example: When ABB — a European engineering firm — was performing well, it had an “elegant matrix design, risk-taking culture, and charismatic chief executive.” When the company’s performance dropped off, ABB had “a dysfunctional organization, a chaotic culture, and an arrogant CEO.”

In reality, neither company had changed much; only the perceptions had changed.

Most of the business books I read are full of this type of after-the-fact “analysis,” where judgments are merely attributions reflecting a company’s performance. It appeals to managers who’d like to find a simple formula that ensures success.

Of course, if success could be reduced to a simple formula, there’d be a lot more successful managers and companies . . .

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

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.

Per our Head of Software Development, IT managers are henceforth being evaluated on the “quality” of their status reports.

A little background on this: We have a weekly conference call during which managers report project status. Every week you the hear the same things over and over: We’re waiting on this. We’re waiting on that. We’re working on requirements. We’re figuring out the architecture. We’re doing the design.

Very rarely does anyone say, “We delivered working software to a customer.”

Even more rarely does anyone say, “We delivered working software to a customer, the customer is using it, and can’t stop raving about how great it is.”

What would be our motivation for evaluating practices rather than accomplishments? When I do projects, I like to be evaluated on one thing: my ability to deliver business value to a customer.

Everything else is waste.

Thus spoke The Programmer.

Chance favors the prepared mind.

— Louis Pasteur

Today is the dumbest day of the rest of your life. If you’re doing a software project, you should know at least a little bit more about the project tomorrow than you do today, the next day a little bit more, and so on.

Don’t get into detailed decisions and plans at the beginning of the project. Defer decisions to the last responsible moment; that’s when you’ll have the best information available.

Upfront planning is not for the purpose of generating plans, which quickly go obsolete, but for the purpose of creating prepared minds with which to face the uncertain future.

We have been distracted by colleges and the PMI. We’ve been told if you want successful projects, then do those things recommended by the ANSI standard for project management. What is that standard? It is the PMI Body of Knowledge®, ANSI/PMI 99-001-2000. (Did you notice the designation of the registered trademark? Trying to refrain from cynical comments let me say might there be commercial interests involved?) We’ve been told to do more of what we’ve been doing. To get more people certified by PMI, to do a more comprehensive job of creating project schedules, and to always keep our CPM schedules up-to-date. It seems to me doing more of the same only benefits the status quo: the providers of software, training, and consulting. Yet we all know of projects where they are doing everything PMI recommends, and the project is still late, over budget, missing key functions, or all three.

— Hal Macomber

Jerry Weinberg’s top three reasons for software projects going over budget or failing to meet their original requirements:

1. The original budget, schedule and requirements were totally unrealistic, due to the inability of people to speak truth to power.

2. The original budget, schedule and requirements were totally unrealistic, due to the inability of people to understand and acknowledge their own limitations (which we all have).

3. Even in those rare cases that people pass those first two hurdles, they lose emotional control during the project when something goes wrong — and something ALWAYS goes wrong. In 50 years, I’ve never seen a project where something didn’t go wrong. When it does, the project’s success is determined by the leaders’ ability to manage themselves emotionally.