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They were like spectators. You had a feeling they had just wandered in there themselves and somebody had handed them a wrench. There was no identification with the job. No saying, “I am a mechanic.” At 5 P.M. or whenever their eight hours were in, you knew they would cut it off and not have another thought about their work. They were already already trying not to have any thoughts about their work on the job.

— Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

We had a manager’s meeting today on the subject of employee recognition. The text we were given to read in preparation for the meeting was indistinguishable from a handbook on training your new puppy:

Behavior which is reinforced is usually repeated. . . . You risk extinguishing the positive behavior by not recognizing it. . . . Provide compliments in a timely fashion, as soon as possible after the event occurs.

That seems demeaning to me and it trivializes the work. I like to be recognized as a person who does good work but I also want to be recognized as someone who cares about his work. I know better than anyone when my work is good and when it isn’t. I’m not looking for pats on the head.

I said in the meeting that I’d rather try to motivate people by giving them the opportunity to do great work, to have some choices about what that work is, and to become the person they’ve always wanted to be.

I pointed out that we’re giving up our youth, our family — everything we hold dear — to come in to work every day, and if the work isn’t worth doing well for its own sake, then it’s a pretty poor exchange.

“We come to work to make money,” Manager A said, as though explaining something very obvious.

“We should sell off our lives one day at a time to the highest bidder?” I asked. “That seems like a good idea to you?”

“Do you really believe the things that come out of your mouth?” Manager B asked.

Manager C stated that in “the real world,” 99 percent of the people he knows are working their jobs for the money and, financial considerations aside, would rather be doing something else with their lives.

The highest-paying job I ever had — before or since — I quit after eight months. I didn’t have another job to go to; I just hated going in there in the morning and I couldn’t wait to go home in the afternoon. I never got a chance to do anything I enjoyed or anything I was good at.

I’m not doing this stuff to get rich. I am a programmer.

Thus spoke The Programmer.

I’ve got a manager’s meeting later this morning to address the question “What is the impact of passive-aggressive team members?”

Possible responses:

• “How should I know?”
• “Why am I always the first person called on? This is so unfair.”
• Roll eyes and sigh loudly.
• Show up late for the meeting and avoid eye contact with anyone.

• HarvardBusiness.org: 4 Ways to Keep Your Employees Happy http://bit.ly/Xmide #

To understand control’s real role [in software development], you need to distinguish between two drastically different kinds of projects:

• Project A will eventually cost about a million dollars and produce value of around $1.1 million.

• Project B will eventually cost about a million dollars and produce value of more than $50 million.

What’s immediately apparent is that control is really important for Project A but almost not at all important for Project B. This leads us to the odd conclusion that strict control is something that matters a lot on relatively useless projects and much less on useful projects. It suggests that the more you focus on control, the more likely you’re working on a project that’s striving to deliver something of relatively minor value.

To my mind, the question that’s much more important than how to control a software project is, why on earth are we doing so many projects that deliver such marginal value?

— Tom DeMarco, “Software Engineering: An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone?”, IEEE Software, July/August 2009

• HarvardBusiness.org: Focus Your People on What They're Best At http://bit.ly/1WKag #

One friend described an interaction with Fujio Cho, former head of Toyota, visiting a plant and gently chiding people for too much attention to accomplishments and too little on struggle points. If he didn’t know what was difficult for them, he was reported to ask, how would he know where he could be of help?

— HarvardBusiness.org.

From the Lean Enterprise Institute:

• Are we all clear on what is really important for our organization in order to solve customer problems and succeed in the long term? (Or, stated another way, can we get past the merely urgent?)
• Are we agreed on what big problems we need to solve as a team?
• Are we sure what obstacles are in our way and their root causes?
• Have we — or will we now — assign responsibility for determining the best countermeasures and removing the obstacles?
• Critically important, do we have a way of surfacing and resolving all of the cross-function, cross-department conflicts that stand in the way of resolving all major problems in any multi-functional organization including ours?

A couple of days ago, I saw one of our senior managers walking down the hallway with her hands clasped behind her back.

I’d never seen her do that before — the hands thing, I mean. It gave her a different look — in fact, it gave her a different sort of presence — so I decided to try it myself.

I immediately felt more thoughtful — or at least I felt like I looked more thoughtful — like a professor strolling across the quad.

Today I was doing it again when I happened to meet up with the woman I copied it from.

I told her I was trying to emulate her hands-behind-the-back leadership technique.

She said the only reason she’d been doing that is her shoulders were sore from Pilates class and she was trying to stretch them out . . .

There is no accountability without volition, you’ve noticed, right? You can’t go “You got to ship that by November 1st and I am holding you accountable.” It doesn’t work that way.

You can’t hold someone else accountable, you’ve got to hold yourself accountable. It’s just like you can’t motivate someone else; you got to motivate yourself. And the more that you motivate people and hold them accountable, the more infantile they become.

— Jim McCarthy

I use charts like this one to track open project tickets, color-coded by priority.

At a meeting last week, I pointed out that the number of open tickets on this particular project had peaked out at 70 and was now dropping faster than the value of my house, at which one of the attendees laughed more enthusiastically than I thought was necessary.

“Why is that funny?” I asked. I mean, it was supposed to be a little funny, but not laugh-out-loud funny.

“I’ve been there,” she said.

Managers will often demand proof that questing for quality will have some measurable “return on investment.” That’s an easy one. Just agree to provide ROI numbers using the same system they currently use. No such system exists.

When a manager demands that you justify your efforts, simply ask her the same in reverse. How does she justify her current methods?

— Alan Cooper

Q: What do you perceive as the greatest current challenge for software development managers and how do you help them overcome it?

The greatest current (and past and future) challenge for software development managers, and for all humans everywhere I suspect, is accurately perceiving reality and effectively accounting for it in their behavior. . . .

 

Q: What is your number one software project management tip, trick or technique?

Discussion should be illegal. Less talk, more code.

— PM Interviews: Jim McCarthy

Here’s an idea: Try leading a thirsty horse to water and see what it does. If the horse is tired, lead it to shade and a soft place to lie down. If the horse is hungry, offer it hay and oats. If the horse doesn’t need anything, maybe leave it alone.

— Dale Emery

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