Full Title: Peopleware. Productive Projects and Teams
Highlights
We, along with nearly everyone else involved in the high-tech endeavors, were convinced that technology was all, that whatever your problems were, there had to be a better technology solution to them. But if what you were up against was inherently sociological, better technology seemed unlikely to be much help. If a group of people who had to work together didn’t trust each other, for example, no nifty software package or gizmo was going to make a difference. (Location 99)
Most of us as managers are prone to one particular failing: a tendency to manage people as though they were modular components. (Location 139)
The major problems of our work are not so much technological as sociological in nature. (Location 175)
Most managers are willing to concede the idea that they’ve got more people worries than technical worries. But they seldom manage that way. They manage as though technology were their principal concern. They spend their time puzzling over the most convoluted and most interesting puzzles that their people will have to solve, almost as though they themselves were going to do the work rather than manage it. (Location 176)
The researchers who made fundamental breakthroughs in those areas are in a high-tech business. The rest of us are appliers of their work. We use computers and other new technology components to develop our products or to organize our affairs. Because we go about this work in teams and projects and other tightly knit working groups, we are mostly in the human communication business. Our successes stem from good human interactions by all participants in the effort, and our failures stem from poor human interactions. (Location 190)
The main reason we tend to focus on the technical rather than the human side of the work is not because it’s more crucial, but because it’s easier to do. (Location 194)
Development is inherently different from production. But managers of development and allied efforts often allow their thinking to be shaped by a management philosophy derived entirely from a production environment. (Location 200)
For most thinking workers, making an occasional mistake is a natural and healthy part of their work. But there can be an almost Biblical association between error on the job and sin. This is an attitude we need to take specific pains to change. (Location 216)
Fostering an atmosphere that doesn’t allow for error simply makes people defensive. They don’t try things that may turn out badly. You encourage this defensiveness when you try to systematize the process, when you impose rigid methodologies so that staff members are not allowed to make any of the key strategic decisions lest they make them incorrectly. (Location 223)
The opposite approach would be to encourage people to make some errors. You do this by asking your folks on occasion what dead-end roads they’ve been down, and by making sure they understand that “none” is not the best answer. When people blow it, they should be congratulated—that’s part of what they’re being paid for. (Location 227)
Many development managers adopt the same attitude. They go to great lengths to convince themselves that no one is irreplaceable. Because they fear that a key person will leave, they force themselves to believe that there is no such thing as a key person. (Location 243)
Steady-state production thinking is particularly ill-suited to project work. We tend to forget that a project’s entire purpose in life is to put itself out of business. The only steady state in the life of a project is rigor mortis. (Location 262)
the entire focus of project management ought to be the dynamics of the development effort. Yet the way we assess people’s value to a new project is often based on their steady-state characteristics: how much code they can write or how much documentation they can produce. We pay far too little attention to how well each of them fits into the effort as a whole. (Location 264)
The catalyst is important because the project is always in a state of flux. Someone who can help a project to jell is worth two people who just do work. (Location 276)
It’s when the truly Herculean effort is called for that we have to learn to do work less of the time and think about the work more. The more heroic the effort required, the more important it is that the team members learn to interact well and enjoy it. (Location 285)
Historians long ago formed an abstraction about different theories of value: The Spanish Theory, for one, held that only a fixed amount of value existed on earth, and therefore the path to the accumulation of wealth was to learn to extract it more efficiently from the soil or from people’s backs. Then there was the English Theory that held that value could be created through ingenuity and technology. So the English had an Industrial Revolution, while the Spanish spun their wheels trying to exploit the land and the Indians in the New World. (Location 307)
Productivity ought to mean achieving more in an hour of work, but all too often it has come to mean extracting more for an hour of pay. (Location 313)
Just as the unpaid overtime was largely invisible to the Spanish Theory manager (who always counts the week as forty hours regardless of how much time the people put in), so too is the undertime invisible. (Location 337)
Overtime is like sprinting: It makes some sense for the last hundred yards of the marathon for those with any energy left, but if you start sprinting in the first mile, you’re just wasting time. Trying to get people to sprint too much can only result in loss of respect for the manager. (Location 341)
Workaholism is more like the common cold: Everyone has a bout of it now and then. Our purpose in writing about it here is not so much to discuss its causes and cures, but to address the simpler problem of how you, the manager, ought to deal with your workaholics. If you exploit them to the hilt in typical Spanish Theory fashion, you’ll eventually lose them. (Location 355)
the process of improving productivity risks motivating employees to look for more satisfying work elsewhere. That doesn’t say you can’t improve productivity without paying a turnover price. It only says you need to take turnover into account whenever you set out to attain higher productivity. Otherwise, you may achieve an “improvement” that is more than offset by the loss of your key people. (Location 369)
People under time pressure don’t work better—they just work faster. In order to work faster, they may have to sacrifice the quality of the product and of their own work experience. (Location 390)
Chances are, you can think of at least one incident when a person’s emotions did flare up as a direct result of something purely work-related. Consider that incident now and ask yourself (probably for the nth time), Where did all the emotion come from? Without knowing anything about your specific incident, we’re willing to bet that threatened self-esteem was a factor. There may be many and varied causes of emotional reaction in one’s personal life, but in the workplace, the major arouser of emotions is threatened self-esteem. (Location 400)
Any step you take that may jeopardize the quality of the product is likely to set the emotions of your staff directly against you. (Location 406)
Workers kept under extreme time pressure will begin to sacrifice quality. They will push problems under the rug to be dealt with later or foisted off onto the product’s end user. They will deliver products that are unstable and not really complete. They will hate what they’re doing, (Location 412)
The hard-nosed, real-world manager part of you has an answer to all this: “Some of my folks would tinker forever with a task, all in the name of ‘Quality.’ But the market doesn’t give a damn about that much quality—it’s screaming for the product to be delivered yesterday and will accept it even in a quick-and-dirty state.” In many cases, you may be right about the market, but the decision to pressure people into delivering a product that doesn’t measure up to their own quality standards is almost always a mistake. (Location 415)
Allowing the standard of quality to be set by the buyer, rather than the builder, is what we call the flight from excellence. A market-derived quality standard seems to make good sense only as long as you ignore the effect on the builder’s attitude and effectiveness. (Location 441)
Quality, far beyond that required by the end user, is a means to higher productivity. (Location 444)
“Japan.” The nation that is an acknowledged quality leader is also known for its high productivity. (Location 448)
The trade-off between price and quality does not exist in Japan. Rather, the idea that high quality brings on cost reduction is widely accepted. (Location 452)
in his book Quality Is Free, published in 1979. In this work, Crosby gave numerous examples and a sound rationale for the idea that letting the builder set a satisfying quality standard of his own will result in a productivity gain sufficient to offset the cost of improved quality. (Location 456)
In some Japanese companies, notably Hitachi Software and parts of Fujitsu, the project team has an effective power of veto over delivery of what they believe to be a not-yet-ready product. No matter that the client would be willing to accept even a substandard product, the team can insist that delivery wait until its own standards are achieved. (Location 471)
the notion that work expands to fill the time allocated for it, now known as Parkinson’s Law. (Location 480)
In a healthy work environment, the reasons that some people don’t perform are lack of competence, lack of confidence, and lack of affiliation with others on the project and the project goals. (Location 502)
The most surprising part of the 1985 Jeffery-Lawrence study appeared at the very end, when they investigated the productivity of 24 projects for which no estimates were prepared at all. These projects far outperformed all the others (see Table 5–3). (Location 543)
even if coding and testing went away entirely, you couldn’t expect a gain of 100 percent. There is still all the analysis, negotiation, specification, training, acceptance testing, conversion, and cutover to be done. (Location 594)
technology is moving swiftly, but (the High-Tech Illusion again) most of what you’re doing is not truly high-tech work. While the machines have changed enormously, the business of software development has been rather static. We still spend most of our time working on requirements and specification, the low-tech part of our work. Productivity within the software industry has improved by 3 to 5 percent a year, only marginally better than the steel or automobile industry. (Location 597)
You automate everything else; isn’t it about time you automated away your software development staff? Response: This is another variation of the High-Tech Illusion: the belief that software developers do easily automatable work. Their principal work is human communication to organize the users’ expressions of needs into formal procedure. That work will be necessary no matter how we change the life cycle. And it’s not likely to be automated. (Location 614)
The manager’s function is not to make people work, but to make it possible for people to work. (Location 629)
Almost without exception, the work space given to intellect workers is noisy, interruptive, un-private, and sterile. Some are prettier than others, but not much more functional. No one can get much real work done there. (Location 687)
for most organizations with productivity problems, there is no more fruitful area for improvement than the workplace. As long as workers are crowded into noisy, sterile, disruptive space, it’s not worth improving anything but the workplace. (Location 699)
Staying late or arriving early or staying home to work in peace is a damning indictment of the office environment. (Location 714)
Two people from the same organization tend to perform alike. That means the best performers are clustering in some organizations while the worst performers are clustering in others. (Location 788)
The top performers’ space is quieter, more private, better protected from interruption, and there is more of it. (Location 816)
People in the roles studied needed the space and quiet in order to perform optimally. Cost reduction to provide work space below the minimum would result in a loss of effectiveness that would more than offset the cost savings. Other studies have looked into the same questions and come up with more or less the same answers. The McCue study was different only in one respect: IBM actually followed the recommendations and built a workplace where people can work. (Location 874)
Gilb’s Law: Anything you need to quantify can be measured in some way that is superior to not measuring it at all. (Location 954)
Given that there are ten to one differences from one organization to another, you simply can’t afford to remain ignorant of where you stand. Your competition may be ten times more effective than you are in doing the same work. If you don’t know it, you can’t begin to do something about (Location 974)
Thirty percent of the time, people are noise sensitive, and the rest of the time, they are noise generators. Since the workplace is a mixture of people working alone and people working together, there is a clash of modes. Those working alone are particularly inconvenienced by this clash. Though they represent a minority at any given time, it’s a mistake to ignore them, for it is during their solitary work periods that people actually do the work. The rest of the time is dedicated to subsidiary activities, rest, and chatter. (Location 997)
The worker who tries and tries to get into flow and is interrupted each time is not a happy person. (Location 1016)
If you’re a manager, you may be relatively unsympathetic to the frustrations of being in no-flow. After all, you do most of your own work in interrupt mode—that’s management—but the people who work for you need to get into flow. (Location 1022)
What matters is not the amount of time you’re present, but the amount of time that you’re working at full potential. An hour in flow really accomplishes something, but 10 six-minute work periods sandwiched between 11 interruptions won’t accomplish anything. (Location 1034)
The mechanics of a flow-accounting system are not very complex. Instead of logging hours, people log uninterrupted hours. In order to get honest data, you have to remove the onus from logging too few uninterrupted hours. (Location 1036)
task-accounting scheme that records flow hours instead of body-present hours can give you two huge benefits: First, it focuses your people’s attention on the importance of flow time. If they learn that each workday is expected to afford them at least two or three hours free from interruption, they will take steps to protect those hours. The resultant interrupt-consciousness helps to protect them from casual interruption by peers. (Location 1040)
By regularly noting uninterrupted hours, you are giving official sanction to the notion that people ought to have at least some interrupt-free time. That makes it permissible to hide out, to ignore the phone, or to close the door (if, sigh, there is a door). (Location 1066)
Your people bring their brains with them every morning. They could put them to work for you at no additional cost if only there were a small measure of peace and quiet in the workplace. (Location 1083)
Do you often interrupt a discussion with co-workers or friends to answer a phone? Of course you do. You don’t even consider not answering the phone. Yet what you’re doing is a violation of the common rules of fairness, taking people out of order, just because they insist loudly (BBRRRRIINNNGGGG!) on your attention. (Location 1123)
managers ought to be alert to the effect that interruption can have on their own people who are trying to get something done. But often it’s the manager who is the worst offender. (Location 1138)
People who are charged with getting work done must have some peace and quiet to do it in. That means periods of total freedom from interruptions. When they want to work in flow, they have to have some efficient, acceptable way of ignoring incoming calls. “Acceptable” means the corporate culture realizes that people may sometimes choose to be unavailable for interruption by phone. “Efficient” means that they don’t have to wait out the bell in order to get back to work. (Location 1145)
When electronic mail was first proposed, most of us thought that the great value of it would be the saving in paper. That turns out to be trivial, however, compared to the saving in reimmersion time. The big difference between a phone call and an electronic mail message is that the phone call interrupts and the e-mail does not; the receiver deals with it at his or her own convenience. The amount of traffic going through these systems proves that priority “at the receiver’s convenience” is acceptable for the great majority of business communications. (Location 1151)
If you believe that the environment is working against you, you’ve got to start saying so. You’ll need to create a forum for other people to chime in, too, perhaps with a survey of people’s assessment of their working conditions. (Location 1187)
The next time someone proudly shows you around a newly designed office, think hard about whether it’s the functionality of the space that is being touted or its appearance. All too often, it’s the appearance. (Location 1214)
Many of the everyday tasks performed by professional workers are done in the serial processing center of the left brain. Music will not interfere particularly with this work, since it’s the brain’s holistic right side that digests music. But not all of the work is centered in the left brain. There is that occasional breakthrough that makes you say “Ahah!” and steers you toward an ingenious bypass that may save months or years of work. The creative leap involves right-brain function. If the right brain is busy listening to “1,001 Strings” on Muzak, the opportunity for a creative leap is lost. (Location 1235)
Management, at its best, should make sure there is enough space, enough quiet, and enough ways to ensure privacy so that people can create their own sensible work space. Uniformity has no place in this view. (Location 1262)
Christopher Alexander, architect and philosopher, is best known for his observations on the design process. He frames his concepts in an architectural idiom, but some of his ideas have had influence far beyond the field of architecture. (Location 1283)
The master plan is an attempt to impose totalitarian order. A single and therefore uniform vision governs the whole. In no two places is the same function achieved differently. A side effect of the totalitarian view is that the conceptualization of the facility is frozen in time. (Location 1300)
This natural or organic order emerges when there is perfect balance between the needs of the individual parts of the environment, and the needs of the whole. In an organic environment, every place is unique and the different places also cooperate, with no parts left over, to create a global whole—a whole which can be identified by everyone who is a part of it. (Location 1310)
The University of Cambridge is a perfect example of organic order. One of the most beautiful features of this university is the way the colleges—St. Johns, Trinity, Trinity Hall, Clare, Kings, Peterhouse, Queens—lie between the main street of the town and the river. Each college is a system of residential courts, each college has its entrance on the street, and opens onto the river; each college has its own small bridge that crosses the river, and leads to the meadows beyond; each college has its own boathouse and its own walks along the river. But while each college repeats the same system, each one has its own unique character. The individual courts, entrances, bridges, boathouses and walks are all different.—Christopher Alexander, (Location 1313)
People cannot work effectively if their workspace is too enclosed or too exposed. A good workspace strikes the balance… . You feel more comfortable in a workspace if there is a wall behind you… . There should be no blank wall closer than eight feet in front of you. (As you work, you want to occasionally look up and rest your eyes by focusing them on something farther away than the desk. If there is a blank wall closer than eight feet your eyes will not change focus and they get no relief. In this case you feel too enclosed.) … You should not be able to hear noises very different from the kind you make, from your workplace. Your workplace should be sufficiently enclosed to cut out noises which are a different kind from the ones you make. There is some evidence that one can concentrate on a task better if people around him are doing the same thing, not something else… . Workspaces should allow you to face in different directions. (Location 1335)
Today’s modular cubicle is a masterpiece of compromise: It gives you no meaningful privacy and yet still manages to make you feel isolated. You are poorly protected from noise and disruption; indeed in some cases, sources of noise and disruption are actively piped into your space. You’re isolated because that small lonely space excludes everyone but you (it’s kind of a toilet stall without a toilet). The space makes it difficult to work alone and almost impossible to participate in the social unit that might form around your work. (Location 1349)
Individual modules give poor-quality space to the person working alone and no space at all to the team. The alternative to this is to fashion space explicitly around the working groups. Each team needs identifiable public and semiprivate space. Each individual needs protected private space. Groups of people who have been assigned or have elected to work together need to have a meaningful role in the design of their own space. Ideally, they are aided in this by a central space-planning organization, whose job is to find a chunk of space for the group: “I see there are three of you, so you’ll be needing three hundred square feet or more. Yes, here’s a nice possibility. Now let’s think about layout and furniture… .” The (Location 1353)
Modern office politics makes a great class distinction in the matter of allocating windows. Most participants emerge as losers in the window sweepstakes. People who wouldn’t think of living in a home without windows end up spending most of their daylight time in windowless work space. Alexander has very little patience with windowless space: “Rooms without a view are like prisons for the people who have to stay in them.” (Location 1364)
The narrow configuration also makes it possible to achieve greater integration between indoor and outdoor space. If you’ve ever had the opportunity to work in space that had an outdoor component, it’s hard to imagine ever again limiting yourself to working entirely indoors. (Location 1386)
age-old pattern of interior space is one that has a smooth “intimacy gradient” as you move toward the interior. At the extremity is space where outsiders (messengers and tradesmen and salesmen) may penetrate. Then you move into space that is reserved for insiders (the work group or the family), and finally to space that is only for the individual. This pattern applies to your home as you move from foyer to living room to kitchen to bedroom to bathroom. And it should be true as well of a healthy workplace. (Location 1398)
Without communal eating, no human group can hold together. Give each [working group] a place where people can eat together. Make the common meal a regular event. In particular, start a common lunch in every workplace so that a genuine meal around a common table (not out of boxes, machines or bags) becomes an important, comfortable and daily event… . In our own work group at the Center, we found this worked most beautifully when we took it in turns to cook the lunch. The lunch became an event: a gathering: something that each of us put our love and energy into.—Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language7 (Location 1406)
A common element that runs through all the patterns (both ours and Alexander’s) is reliance upon non-replicable formulas. No two people have to have exactly the same work space. No two coffee areas have to be identical, nor any two libraries or sitting areas. The texture and shape and organization of space are fascinating issues to the people who occupy that space. The space needs to be isomorphic to the work that goes on there. And people at all levels need to leave their mark on the workplace. (Location 1417)
You don’t have to solve the space problem for the whole institution. If you can solve it just for your own people, you’re way ahead. And if your group is more productive and has lower turnover, that just proves you’re a better manager. (Location 1431)
an approach that encourages you to court success with this formula: • Get the right people. • Make them happy so they don’t want to leave. • Turn them loose. (Location 1444)
you have to coordinate the efforts of even the best team so that all the individual contributions add up to an integrated whole. But that’s the relatively mechanical part of management. For most efforts, success or failure is in the cards from the moment the team is formed and the initial directions set out. With talented people, the manager can almost coast from that point on. (Location 1448)
Parents do have a shaping effect on their children over the years, and individuals can obviously bring about huge changes in themselves. But managers are unlikely to change their people in any meaningful way. People usually don’t stay put long enough, and the manager just doesn’t have enough leverage to make a difference in their nature. So the people who work for you through whatever period will be more or less the same at the end as they were at the beginning. If they’re not right for the job from the start, they never will be. (Location 1467)
getting the right people in the first place is all-important. Fortunately, you don’t have to depend entirely on the luck of the draw. You may get to play a significant part in the hiring of new people or the selection of new team members from within the company. If so, your skill at these tasks will determine to a large extent your eventual success. (Location 1471)
Each person you hire becomes part of your little empire and also part of your boss’s empire and that of the next boss up the line. The standard you apply is not just your own. You’re hiring on behalf of the whole corporate ladder above you. (Location 1486)
The most successful manager is the one who shakes up the local entropy to bring in the right people and let them be themselves, even though they may deviate from the corporate norm. Your organization may have rigor mortis, but your little piece of it can hop and skip. (Location 1529)
leadership is not about extracting anything from us; it’s about service. (Location 1556)
In order to lead without positional authority—without anyone ever appointing you leader—you have to do what Mike does: • Step up to the task. • Be evidently fit for the task. • Prepare for the task by doing the required homework ahead of time. • Maximize value to everyone. • Do it all with humor and obvious goodwill. It also helps to have charisma. (Location 1558)
The propensity to lead without being given the authority to do so is what, in organizations, distinguishes people that can innovate and break free of the constraints that limit their competitors. Innovation is all about leadership, and leadership is all about innovation. The rarity of the one is a direct result of the rarity of the other. (Location 1565)
Nobody is given any time to innovate, since everyone is 100-percent busy. • Most innovation that happens anyway is distinctly unwelcome because it requires accommodating change. • Real innovation is likely to spread beyond the realm of the innovator, and so he or she may be suspected of managing the organization from below, a tendency that upper management tends to view with great suspicion. (Location 1572)
it takes a bit of a rebel to help even the best innovation achieve its promise: rebel leadership. The innovator himself doesn’t have to be a great leader, but someone has to be. What rebel leadership supplies to this process is the time to innovate—you take a key person away from doing billable work (this may constitute constructive disobedience on your part) in order to pursue a nascent vision—and the hard push for whatever reshaping the organization has to submit to in order to take advantage of the innovation. (Location 1577)
Aptitude tests are almost always oriented toward the tasks the person will perform immediately after being hired. They test whether he or she is likely to be good at statistical analysis or programming or whatever it is that’s required in the position. You can buy aptitude tests in virtually any technical area, and they all tend to have fairly respectable track records at predicting how well the new hire will perform. (Location 1635)
The aptitude tests we’ve seen are mostly left-brain oriented. That’s because the typical things new hires do are performed largely in the left brain. The things they do later on in their career, however, are to a much greater degree right-brain activities. Management, in particular, requires holistic thinking, heuristic judgment, and intuition based upon experience. So the aptitude test may give you people who perform better in the short term, but are less likely to succeed later on. (Location 1640)
The business we’re in is more sociological than technological, more dependent on workers’ abilities to communicate with each other than their abilities to communicate with machines. (Location 1649)
You ask a candidate to prepare a ten-or fifteen-minute presentation on some aspect of past work. It could be about a new technology and the experience with first trying it out, or about a management lesson learned the hard way, or about a particularly interesting project. The candidate chooses the subject. The date is set and you assemble a small audience made up of those who will be the new hire’s co-workers. (Location 1652)
Disney Fellow Alan Kay defines technology as whatever is around you today but was not there when you were growing up. He further observes that what was already around you when you were growing up has a name: It’s called environment. One generation’s technology is the next generation’s environment. (Location 1715)
the new generational divide in your organization is about attention: Young people divide theirs while their older colleagues tend to focus on one or possibly two tasks at a time. (Location 1723)
The problem is that continuous partial attention is the exact opposite of flow. If you believe, as we do, that a flow state is essential for getting real work done, then you need to set limits on how attention may be divided. You need to make your youngest workers understand the difference between spending 2 percent of their workday on Facebook in a single block of time and spending 2 percent of their attention all day on Facebook. (Location 1728)
Workers who can’t get into flow are not just less effective, they also are unlikely to fit into a jelled team of mixed-generation people. (Location 1732)
Think of imperfect attention at meetings to be more about a dysfunctional meeting culture than about anyone’s work ethic. Stand-up meetings and meetings without open laptops are a way to articulate the contract, (Location 1745)
The younger your people are, the more likely they are to see e-mail as a verbose and dreary waste of time. (Location 1757)
Typical turnover figures we encounter are in the range of 80 percent to 33 percent per year, implying an average employee longevity of from 15 to 36 months. Assume for the moment that the turnover for your company is in the middle of this range. The average person leaves after a little more than two years. It costs one-and-a-half to two months’ salary to hire a new employee, either as a fee to an agency, or as the cost of an in-house personnel service that does the same function. (Location 1770)
By the end of a few months, the new person is doing some useful work; within five months, he or she is at full working capacity. A reasonable assessment of start-up cost is therefore approximately three lost work-months per new hire. (Location 1776)
The total cost of replacing each person is the equivalent of four-and-a-half to five months of employee cost or about 20 percent of the cost of keeping that employee for the full two years on the job. (Location 1778)
Employee turnover costs about 20 percent of all manpower expense. (Location 1785)
In an organization with high turnover, nobody is willing to take the long view. (Location 1796)
from the corporate perspective, late promotion is a sign of health. In companies with low turnover, promotion into the first-level management position comes only after as much as ten years with the company. (Location 1810)
The insidious effect here is that turnover engenders turnover. People leave quickly, so there’s no use spending money on training. Since the company has invested nothing in the individual, the individual thinks nothing of moving on. New people are not hired for their extraordinary qualities, since replacing extraordinary qualities is too difficult. (Location 1821)
The best organizations are consciously striving to be best. This is a common goal that provides common direction, joint satisfaction, and a strong binding effect. There is a mentality of permanence about such places, the sense that you’d be dumb to look for a job elsewhere—people (Location 1869)
in the best organizations, the short term is not the only thing that matters. What matters more is being best. And that’s a long-term concept. (Location 1878)
A common feature of companies with the lowest turnover is widespread retraining. You’re forever bumping into managers and officers who started out as secretaries, payroll clerks, or in the mailroom. They came into the company green, often (Location 1882)
Again, one can prove that retraining is not the cheapest way to fill a new slot. It’s always cheaper in the short run to fire the person who needs retraining and hire someone else who already has the required skills. Most organizations do just that. The best organizations do not. They realize that retraining helps to build the mentality of permanence that results in low turnover and a strong sense of community. They realize that it more than justifies its cost. (Location 1885)
An expense is money that gets used up. At the end of the month, the money is gone and so is the heat (or whatever the expense was for). An investment, on the other hand, is use of an asset to purchase another asset. The value has not been used up, but only converted from one form to another. When you treat an expenditure as an investment instead of as an expense, you are capitalizing the expenditure. (Location 1913)
The general accounting convention is that all salaries are treated as expense, never as capital investment. Sometimes this makes sense, but sometimes it doesn’t. When a worker is building a product that gets sold, it hardly matters: Whether you expense his labor or capitalize it, the amount of money paid to the worker eventually gets deducted from the sales price of the product, in order to calculate profit. You can hardly be faulted for expensing his labor the same way you expense the heat that kept the factory warm; both the labor and the heat are gone at the end of the month. (Location 1917)
now suppose you send that same worker off to a training seminar for a week. His salary and the seminar fee have been spent on something that is not “gone” at the end of the month. Whatever he has learned persists in his head through the coming months. If you’ve spent your training money wisely, it is an investment, perhaps a very good one. But, by accounting convention, we expense it anyway. (Location 1921)
Eventually, your new teammate is completely up to speed, producing at more or less the same rate that Louise did. Real productivity of the database worker position over time looks something like Figure 20–3. (Location 1955)
The shaded area on the graph represents the lost production (work that didn’t get done) caused by Louise’s departure. Or, viewed differently, it is the investment that the company is now making to get Ralph up where Louise was after the company’s past investments in her skills and capabilities. (Location 1960)
Six months to progress from being a slightly negative producer to performing at the rate of your predecessor? This might be a reasonable provision for a new applications programmer, but it probably wouldn’t be nearly enough for anyone joining a team that does even slightly more sophisticated work. When we oblige our clients to put a figure on ramp-up time for new workers, most have to allow far longer than six months. (Location 1966)
Companies that downsize are frankly admitting that their upper management has blown it. But Wall Street still applauds. Why is that? Part of the reason is that it looks so good on the books. A few thousand employees gone, and every penny they would have earned goes right to the bottom line, or at least it seems to. What’s conveniently forgotten in this analysis is the investment in those people—paid for with real, hard-earned dollars and now thrown out the window as if it had no value. (Location 1979)
Companies that manage their investment sensibly will prosper in the long run. Companies of knowledge workers have to realize that it is their investment in human capital that matters most. (Location 1984)
Good work experiences have always got a fair measure of challenge about them. (Location 1988)
What’s in the foreground of most of our prized work memories is team interaction. When a group of people fuse into a meaningful whole, the entire character of the work changes. The challenge of the work is important, but not in and of itself; it is important because it gives us something to focus on together. The challenge is the instrument for our coming together. In the best work groups, the ones in which people have the most fun and perform at their upper limits, team interactions are everything. (Location 1994)
A jelled team is a group of people so strongly knit that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The production of such a team is greater than that of the same people working in unjelled form. Just as important, the enjoyment that people derive from their work is greater than what you’d expect given the nature of the work itself. (Location 2004)
Once a team begins to jell, the probability of success goes up dramatically. The team can become almost unstoppable, a juggernaut for success. Managing these juggernaut teams is a real pleasure. You spend most of your time just getting obstacles out of their way, clearing the path so that bystanders don’t get trampled underfoot: “Here they come, folks. Stand back and hold onto your hats.” They don’t need to be managed in the traditional sense, and they certainly don’t need to be motivated. They’ve got momentum. (Location 2008)
Prior to a team’s jelling, the individuals on the team might have had a diversity of goals. But as part of the jelling process, they have all bought into the common goal. This corporate goal takes on an enhanced importance because of its significance to the group. Even though the goal itself may seem arbitrary to team members, they pursue it with enormous energy. (Location 2013)
Believing that workers will automatically accept organizational goals is the sign of naïve managerial optimism. The mechanism by which individuals involve themselves in the organization’s objectives is more complex than that. (Location 2019)
Throughout the upper ranks of the organization, there is marvelous ingenuity at work to be sure that each manager has a strong personal incentive to accept the corporate goals. Only at the bottom, where the real work is performed, does this ingenuity fail. There we count on “professionalism” and nothing else to assure that people are all pulling in the same direction. Lots of luck. (Location 2031)
From the time of jelling, the team itself had been the real focus for their energies. They were in it for joint success, the pleasure of achieving the goal, any goal, together. (Location 2047)
Goals of corporations are always going to seem arbitrary to people—corporations seem arbitrary to people—but the arbitrariness of goals doesn’t mean no one is ever going to accept them. If it did, we wouldn’t have sports. The goals in sports are always utterly arbitrary. The Universe doesn’t care whether the little white ball goes between the posts at Argentina’s end of the field or those at Italy’s. But a lot of people get themselves very involved in the outcome. Their involvement is a function of the social units they belong to. (Location 2050)
In spite of the useful energy and enthusiasm that characterize jelled teams, managers don’t take particular pains to foster them. Part of the reason is an imperfect understanding of why teams matter. The manager who is strongly motivated toward goal attainment is likely to observe that teams don’t attain goals; people on the teams attain goals. Virtually all of the component tasks required to meet the objective are performed by the individuals who make up the team. Most of this work is done by individuals working alone. (Location 2058)
There is very little true teamwork required in most of our work. But teams are still important, for they serve as a device to get everyone pulling in the same direction. The purpose of a team is not goal attainment but goal alignment. When the team is fulfilling its purpose, team members are more effective because they’re more directed. (Location 2062)
A few very characteristic signs indicate that a jelled team has occurred. The most important of these is low turnover during projects and in the middle of well-defined tasks. The team members aren’t going anywhere till the work is done. (Location 2066)
Sadly, managers often miss this strong indication of their own success. They are disinclined to pay attention to turnover even when it’s killing them; when turnover is low, they don’t think about it at all. (Location 2069)
Jelled teams are usually marked by a strong sense of identity. The teams you hear discussed in the industry have colorful names: the “Okie Coders” at General Electric, or the “Gang of Four” at DuPont, or the “Chaos Group” at Cincinnati Gas & Electric. Teammates may all use the same catch phrases and share many in-jokes. There may be obvious team space. The teams may congregate at lunch or hang out at the same watering hole after work. (Location 2071)
There is a sense of eliteness on a good team. Team members feel they’re part of something unique. They feel they’re better than the run of the mill. They have a cocky, SWAT Team attitude that may be faintly annoying to people who aren’t part of the group. (Location 2074)
There is invariably a feeling of joint ownership of the product built by the jelled team. Participants are pleased to have their names grouped together on a product or a part of one. The individual is eager for peer review. (Location 2077)
The final sign of a jelled team is the obvious enjoyment that people take in their work. Jelled teams just feel healthy. The interactions are easy and confident and warm. (Location 2079)
The difference between a team and a clique is like the difference between a breeze and a draft. Breeze and draft have identical meanings: They both mean “cool current of air.” If you find that cool current of air delightful, you call it a breeze; if you find it annoying, you call it a draft. The connotations are different, but the denotation is the same. Similarly, there is no difference in denotation between a team and a clique, but the connotations are opposite. People use team when the tight bonding of the jelled working group is pleasing to them. And they use clique when it represents a threat. (Location 2084)
Fear of cliques is a sign of managerial insecurity. The greater the insecurity, the more frightening the idea of a clique can be. There are reasons for this: Managers are often not true members of their teams (Location 2089)
The loyalties within the group are stronger than those tying the group to the company. Then there is the awful thought that a tightly knit team may leave en masse and take all of its energy and enthusiasm over to the competition. For all these reasons, the insecure manager is threatened by cliques. (Location 2092)
You can’t make teams jell. You can hope they will jell; you can cross your fingers; you can act to improve the odds of jelling—but you can’t make it happen. The process is much too fragile to be controlled. (Location 2144)
We stopped talking about building teams, and talked instead of growing them. The agricultural image seemed right. Agriculture isn’t entirely controllable. You enrich the soil, you plant seeds, you water according to the latest theory, and you hold your breath. You just might get a crop; you might not. If it all comes up roses, you’ll feel fine, but next year you’ll be sweating it out again. That’s pretty close to how team formation works. (Location 2147)
we tried a trick called inversion, described in Edward deBono’s Lateral Thinking. When you’re stuck trying to solve a problem, deBono suggests that rather than looking for ways to achieve your goal, look for ways to achieve the exact opposite of your goal. This can have the effect of clearing away the brain’s cobwebs that keep you from being creative. (Location 2151)
Our short list of teamicide techniques is • Defensive management • Bureaucracy • Physical separation • Fragmentation of people’s time • Quality reduction of the product • Phony deadlines • Clique control (Location 2156)
There’s one area, though, where defensiveness will always backfire: You can’t protect yourself against your own people’s incompetence. If your staff isn’t up to the job at hand, you will fail. Of course, if the people are badly suited to the job, you should get new people. But once you’ve decided to go with a given group, your best tactic is to trust them. (Location 2167)
At any point in the project where you don’t interpose your own judgment, your people are more likely to make a mistake. So what? Let them make some mistakes. That doesn’t mean you can’t override a decision (very occasionally) or give specific direction to the project. But if the staff comes to believe it’s not allowed to make any errors of its own, the message that you don’t trust them comes through loud and clear. There is no message you can send that will better inhibit team formation. (Location 2182)
The right to be right (in your manager’s eyes or in your government’s eyes) is irrelevant; it’s only the right to be wrong that makes you free. (Location 2189)
The most obvious defensive management ploys are prescriptive Methodologies (“ My people are too dumb to build systems without them.”) and technical interference by the manager. Both are doomed to fail in the long run. In addition, they make for efficient teamicide. People who feel untrusted have little inclination to bond together into a cooperative team. (Location 2190)
There is a depressing modern trend to make development workers more and more into bureaucrats. Perhaps this is a sign of epidemic defensive management. (Location 2198)
Mindless paper pushing is a waste. It ought to be attacked because it keeps people from working. But our point here is a slightly different one. It is that bureaucracy hurts team formation. The team needs to believe in whatever goal it forms around. That goal can be arbitrary, but at least it has to exist. There has to be some evidence that management believes in it. Just telling your people that the goal matters won’t be enough if you also have to tell them they should spend a third of their time pushing paper. Paper pushers just can’t get themselves into SWAT Team mode. (Location 2201)
Physical separation of people who are expected to interact closely doesn’t make much sense anyway. Neighboring workers are a source of noise and disruption. When they’re all on the same team, they tend to go into quiet mode at the same time, so there is less interruption of flow. (Location 2214)
Fragmentation is bad for team formation, but it’s also bad for efficiency. (Perhaps you’ve begun to pick up a trend here.) People can keep track of only so many human interactions. When they try to be part of four working groups, they have four times as many interactions to track. They spend all their time changing gears. (Location 2224)
No one can be part of multiple jelled teams. The tight interactions of the jelled team are exclusive. Enough fragmentation and teams just won’t jell. The saddest thing is we allow far more fragmentation than is really necessary. (Location 2227)
An early casualty of quality reduction is whatever sense of team identification the group has been able to build. Co-workers who are developing a shoddy product don’t even want to look each other in the eye. (Location 2235)
tight deadlines can sometimes be demotivating. But there are certainly cases where a tight but not impossible deadline can constitute an enjoyable challenge to the team. What’s never going to help, however, is a phony deadline. (Location 2240)
In the typical phony deadline spiel, the manager announces that the work must be done on such and such a date. The date mentioned is impossible to meet, and everyone knows it. The effort will certainly slip (so much for the idea that the deadline is absolute). The work has been defined in such a way that success is impossible. The message to the workers is clear: The boss is a Parkinsonian robot with no respect or concern for them. The boss believes they won’t do a stroke of work except under duress. Don’t expect a jelled team on that project. (Location 2248)
The pleasures of team activity and the energy that is produced by team interaction are articles of faith in our society. How did business organizations ever come to be so (Location 2258)
For all the talk about “management teams,” there really is no such thing—certainly never jelled teams at the managerial level. When managers are bonded into teams, it’s only because they serve dual roles: manager on the one hand and group member on the other. They become accepted as part-time peers by the people they manage. (Location 2261)
In almost any team of four or five or six people, there are bound to be a few who can’t be expected to put in the kind of overtime that might fit pretty well into some of the others’ lives. All that can be shrugged off as unimportant if the overtime is only a matter of a few long evenings and maybe one extra weekend day. But if the overtime drags on over months and starts to exact a real toll on even the most willing team members, there is bound to be damage to team cohesion. The people who aren’t sharing the pain will become, little by little, estranged from the others. And the team magic will be gone. (Location 2316)
Extended overtime is a productivity-reduction technique, anyway. The extra hours are almost always more than offset by the negative side effects. (Location 2321)
Consultant and author Jerry Weinberg has an answer of sorts: He suggests that we don’t work overtime so much to get the work done on time as to shield ourselves from blame when the work inevitably doesn’t get done on time. (Location 2326)
the typical team of knowledge workers has a mix of skills, only some of which the boss has mastered. The boss usually coaches only some of the team members. What of the others? We are increasingly convinced that the team members themselves provide most of the coaching. (Location 2351)
When you observe a well-knit team in action, you’ll see a basic hygienic act of peer-coaching that is going on all the time. Team members sit down in pairs to transfer knowledge. When this happens, there is always one learner and one teacher. Their roles tend to switch back and forth over time (Location 2353)
coaching is an important factor in successful team interaction. It provides coordination as well as personal growth to the participants. It also feels good. We tend to look back on significant coaching we’ve received as a near religious experience. We feel a huge debt to those who have coached us in the past, a debt that we cheerfully discharge by coaching others. (Location 2357)
Internal competition has the direct effect of making coaching difficult or impossible. Since coaching is essential to the workings of a healthy team, anything the manager does to increase competition within a team has to be viewed as teamicidal. (Location 2363)
Here are some of the managerial actions that tend to produce teamicidal side effects: • Annual salary or merit reviews • Management by objectives (MBO) • Praise of certain workers for extraordinary accomplishment • Awards, prizes, bonuses tied to performance • Performance measurement in almost any form But hold on here, aren’t these the very things that managers spend much or even most of their time doing? Sadly, yes. And yet these actions are likely to be teamicidal. (Location 2365)
Remove barriers that rob people in management and in engineering of their right to pride of workmanship. This means [among other things] abolishment of the annual or merit rating and of management by objectives. 1 1. W. E. Deming, Out of the Crisis (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Center for Advanced Engineering Study, 1982), p. 24. (Location 2374)
Deming’s point is that MBO and its ilk are managerial cop-outs. By using simplistic extrinsic motivators to goad performance, managers excuse themselves from harder matters such as investment, direct personal motivation, thoughtful team formation, staff retention, and ongoing analysis and redesign of work procedures. (Location 2379)
We have all seen sports teams that succeeded in spite of the failure of one of the individuals. We have also seen individual team members have a great night while their team was losing badly. The success or failure of the individual is thus disconnected from the success or failure of the group as a whole. This is an imperfect situation, one that only exacerbates any incipient tendency toward competition. (Location 2394)
The common thread is that good managers provide frequent easy opportunities for the team to succeed together. The opportunities may be tiny pilot subprojects, or demonstrations, or simulations, anything that gets the team quickly into the habit of succeeding together. The best success is the one in which there is no evident management, in which the team works as a genial aggregation of peers. The best boss is the one who can manage this over and over again without the team members knowing they’ve been “managed.” These bosses are viewed by their peers as just lucky. (Location 2431)
It’s heady and a little frightening to know that the boss has put part of his or her reputation into the subordinates’ hands. It brings out the best in everyone. The team has something meaningful to form around. They’re not just getting a job done. They’re making sure that the trust that’s been placed in them is rewarded. (Location 2475)
If you’ve got decent people under you, there is probably nothing you can do to improve their chances of success more dramatically than to get yourself out of their hair occasionally. (Location 2488)
The engineering profession is famous for a kind of development mode that doesn’t exist elsewhere: the skunkworks project. Skunkworks implies that the project is hidden away someplace where it can be done without upper management’s knowing what’s going on. This happens when people at the lowest levels believe so strongly in the rightness of a product that they refuse to accept management’s decision to kill it. (Location 2502)
Between master craftsman and apprentice there is a bond of natural authority—the master knows how to do the work and the apprentice does not. Submitting to this kind of authority demeans no one, it doesn’t remove incentive, it doesn’t make it impossible to knit with fellow workers. An insecure need for obedience is the opposite of natural authority. (Location 2536)
In the best organizations, there is natural authority working in all directions. The manager is known to be better at some things, perhaps setting general directions, negotiating, and hiring, and is trusted to do those things. Each of the workers is known to have some special area of expertise, and is trusted by all as a natural authority in that area. (Location 2540)
Some organizations are famous for their consistent good luck in getting well-knit teams to happen. It isn’t luck, of course; it’s chemistry. There is something about those organizations, some optimal mix of competence and trust and mutual esteem and well-person sociology that provides perfect soil for the growth of jelled teams. And it’s not only team formation that benefits from these factors. Everything works better. These organizations are just plain healthy. (Location 2544)
organizations with the best chemistry, managers devote their energy to building and maintaining healthy chemistry. Departments and divisions that glow with health do so because their managers make it happen. There is a holistic integrity to their method, and so it’s hard to break down and analyze the component parts (Location 2555)
Presented below is an admittedly simplistic list of the elements of a chemistry-building strategy for a healthy organization: • Make a cult of quality. • Provide lots of satisfying closure. • Build a sense of eliteness. • Allow and encourage heterogeneity. • Preserve and protect successful teams. • Provide strategic but not tactical direction. (Location 2558)
The judgment that a still-imperfect product is “good enough” is the death knell for a jelling team. There can be no impetus to bind together with your cohorts for the joint satisfaction gained from delivering mediocre work. The opposite attitude, of “only perfect is good enough for us,” gives the team a real chance. This cult of quality is the strongest catalyst for team formation. It binds the team together because it sets its members apart from the rest of the world. (Location 2567)
Your marketplace, your product consumers, your clients, and your upper management are never going to make the case for high quality. Extraordinary quality doesn’t make good short-term economic sense. When team members develop a cult of quality, they always turn out something that’s better than what their market is asking for. They can do this, but only when protected from short-term economics. In the long run, this always pays off. People get high on quality and outdo themselves to protect it. (Location 2576)
employees who take a perverse pride in being difficult to manage or hard to motivate or unable to work with others may be reacting to too much control. They would almost certainly rather express themselves in some less difficult way, something that would not work to the detriment of the group’s effectiveness. (Location 2609)
A jelled team does have the effect of making people more productive and goal-directed. And you do give up some control, or at least the illusion of control, when it jells. The team begins to feel elite in some way or other, with all members of the team sharing in the sense of eliteness. (Location 2619)
Managers who feel threatened by elite teams often talk of the deleterious effect their eliteness can have on people outside the team. If members of one small working group begin to characterize themselves as Winners, isn’t everyone else automatically put into the category Losers? It is true that extremely successful teams can be daunting to those outside the team. But this is not so much the effect of the team as of the success. (Location 2627)
If a team does knit, don’t break it up. At least give people the option to undertake another project together. They may choose to go their separate ways, but they ought to have the choice. When teams stay together from one project to the next, they start out each new endeavor with enormous momentum. (Location 2632)
This may offend your sensibilities as a manager, but managers are usually not part of the teams that they manage. Teams are made up of peers, equals that function as equals. The manager is most often outside the team, giving occasional direction from above and clearing away administrative and procedural obstacles. (Location 2635)
On the best teams, different individuals provide occasional leadership, taking charge in areas where they have particular strengths. No one is the permanent leader, because that person would then cease to be a peer and the team interaction would begin to break down. (Location 2640)
The structure of a team is a network, not a hierarchy. (Location 2642)
A little bit of heterogeneity can be an enormous aid to create a jelled team. Add one handicapped developer to a newly formed work group, and the odds go up that the team will knit. The same effect can result from adding a co-op student or an ex-admin on the first project after being retrained. Whatever the heterogeneous element is, it takes on symbolic importance to team members. (Location 2651)
When you automate a previously all-human system, it becomes entirely deterministic. The new system is capable of making only those responses planned explicitly by its builders. So the self-healing quality is lost. Any response that will be required must be put there in the first place. If ever the system needs to be healed, that can only be done outside the context of its operation. Maintainers come in to take the system apart and reconstruct it with one or more new planned responses added. (Location 2674)
In one view, getting rid of the rather messy and uncontrollable self-healing capacity is a positive benefit of automation. The system is planned “right” in the first place, and then there is no need for tinkering during operation. But it’s no secret that this can be expensive. Automators spend much of their time thinking through situations that are so unlikely or occur so rarely that the human elements of the old system never even bothered to consider them unless and until they actually happened. If the business policy governing the new system has a sufficient degree of natural ad hoc-racy, it’s a mistake to automate it. Determinism will be no asset then; the system will be in constant need of maintenance. (Location 2677)
The reason that nondeterministic systems can often heal themselves painlessly and elegantly (sometimes at no cost at all) is that the humans who make up the system have an easy familiarity with the underlying goals. When a new situation crops up, they know immediately what action makes sense. Someday it may be possible to teach computers the goals of the system instead of the actions expected to achieve the goals, but right now that’s beyond the horizon. The point here is that making a system deterministic will result in the loss of its ability to heal itself. (Location 2683)
A Methodology is a general systems theory of how a whole class of thought-intensive work ought to be conducted. It comes in the form of a fat book that specifies in detail exactly what steps to take at any time, regardless of who’s doing the work, regardless of where or when. The people who write the Methodology are smart. The people who carry it out can be dumb. They never have to turn their brains to the ON position. (Location 2693)
The project workers are the ones most familiar with the territory of the project. If a given direction doesn’t make sense to them, it doesn’t make any sense at all. (Location 2705)
Big M Methodology is an attempt to centralize thinking. 1 All meaningful decisions are made by the Methodology builders, not by the staff assigned to do the work. Those who espouse a Methodology have a long list of its supposed benefits, including standardization, documentary uniformity, managerial control, and state-of-the-art techniques. These make up the overt case for the Methodology. The covert case is simpler and cruder: the idea that project people aren’t smart enough to do the thinking. (Location 2710)
In the software development field, Methodology suddenly became a bad word and people started talking instead about Process. (Location 2715)
Better ways to achieve convergence of method are Training: People do what they know how to do. If you give them all a common core of methods, they will tend to use those methods. Tools: A few automated aids for modeling, design, implementation, and test will get you more convergence of method than all the statutes you can pass. Peer Review: In organizations where there are active peer-review mechanisms (quality circles, walkthroughs, inspections, technology fairs), there is a natural tendency toward convergence. (Location 2758)
In the spring of 1932, efficiency experts ran a series of tests at the Hawthorne Western Electric Company to determine the effects of various environmental parameters on productivity. They tried raising the light level, and they noted that productivity went up. Then they tried lowering the light level, and they noted that productivity went up higher still. They speculated that turning the lights off entirely might send productivity through the roof. What seemed to be happening was that the change itself wasn’t as important as the act of changing. People were charmed by differentness, they liked the attention, they were intrigued by novelty. This has come to be called the Hawthorne Effect. Loosely stated, it says that people perform better when they’re trying something new. (Location 2777)
Our book Waltzing With Bears: Managing Risk on Software Projects takes issue with two opposite kinds of behavior: risk-taking without risk management, and risk-aversion that makes impossible the accomplishment of anything ambitious. What we now see in increasing numbers are organizations that manage to err on both sides: They take on one class of stupid risk with impunity, while avoiding the very ones that might be indicators of transformational value. (Location 2793)
The Peopleware premise—our main problems are more likely to be sociological than technological in nature—applies nowhere more strongly than in the area of risk. (Location 2797)
The mechanics of risk management are widely understood; when it doesn’t get done, the reason is likely to be in the organization’s politics and culture. (Location 2798)
it’s worth saying that project risk is a good thing, a likely indicator of value. Projects that have real value but little or no risk were all done ages ago. The ones that matter today are laden with risk. (Location 2800)
The risk we tend not to manage is the risk of our own failure. (Location 2816)
you need to consider the real reason for risk management: It’s not to make the risks go away, but to enable sensible mitigation should they occur. (Location 2821)
It’s perfectly reasonable not to manage a risk for which the probability of occurrence is extremely low. It’s not reasonable to leave unmanaged the risk for which the consequences are “just too awful to think about.” (Location 2833)
often skilled at characterizing a desired outcome as a challenge. They pose the challenge as something that will be a proof of excellence. But in many cases what they’re trying to accomplish is not to goad the team into excellence, but to get team members to finish the project on the cheap. Perversely, the more marginal the benefit carried by the project, the more important it is to deliver it cheaply. (Location 2844)
It’s no surprise that cheap delivery to hide lousy benefit is not a great motivator, so executives in this position might find themselves saying, “This work is so important that we must have it done by January first.” What they really mean is, “This work is so unimportant that we don’t want to fund it beyond January first.” (Location 2847)
As organizations age, meeting time increases until—in the final stages—there is time for nothing else. (Location 2858)
As the number of vested parties to any action increases, meeting population goes up. Additionally, meetings give visibility, an essential factor to anyone who hopes to rise in big-company hierarchy. You don’t get noticed by listening thoughtfully, so anyone who’s there for visibility is likely to be a talker. The worst meetings feel like congregations of windbags with nobody listening and everybody speaking or waiting to speak. Because there are so many who need to speak, meeting duration increases seemingly without bound. (Location 2860)
a decision. Who should be invited? That’s easy, the people who need to agree before the decision can be judged made. Nobody else. To make sure no one is blindsided, it’s essential that the working meeting have an agenda relevant to its purpose and that it stick to that agenda. (Location 2891)
Working meetings have a charming characteristic. You know when they’re done. When the decision has been reached, there is no further need to meet. Before it’s been reached, the meeting is not yet complete. Same idea backwards: If you can say definitively what group action terminates the meeting, then it’s a working meeting. (Location 2894)
meeting that is ended by the clock is a ceremony. Its purpose is not to get any particular thing decided. It’s all FYI. The FYIing often happens in a ritualistic manner: quick intro and announcements by a boss, followed by serial one-on-one interactions between the boss and each subordinate. At any given moment, two people are involved. (Location 2901)
There is occasionally a real need for ceremony in the workplace. A ceremony might be called to celebrate some accomplishment, to lay out a strategic change of direction, or to evaluate a project at its end. All of these justifiable ceremonies are a bit out of the ordinary. That’s what makes them justifiable. It’s the regular ceremony that needs to be suspect. An example of a regular ceremony is the weekly (or daily!) status meeting, with ten or twenty people locked in a room taking turns talking to the boss. (Location 2907)
The attendance of working meetings is limited to the vested-interest participants, the fewer the better. The attendance of ceremonial meetings is not limited at all. Anybody that the person in charge deems desirable is going to be there, the more the merrier. (Location 2912)
You can’t change the world above you, but you can change your own area and the lives of the people who work beside and below you. The changes are easy to describe but hard to effect. Your goal should be to eliminate most ceremonial meetings and spend the time in one-on-one conversation, to limit attendance at working meetings and apply the “What ends this meeting?” test to each one. (Location 2945)
The ultimate management sin is wasting people’s time. It sounds like this should be an easy sin to avoid, but it isn’t. (Location 2950)
When you convoke a meeting with n people present, the normal presumption is that all those in the room are there because they need to interact with each other in order to come to certain conclusions. When, instead, the participants take turns interacting with one key figure, the expected rationale for assembling the whole group is missing; the boss might just as well have interacted separately with each of the subordinates without obliging the others to listen in. (Location 2957)
The ceremony supplies reassurance. It establishes for everyone that the boss is boss, that he or she gets to run the meeting, that attendance is expected, that the hierarchy is being respected. (Location 2964)
A real working meeting is called when there is a real reason for all the people invited to think through some matter together. The purpose of the meeting is to reach consensus. (Location 2966)
Any regular get-together is therefore somewhat suspect as likely to have a ceremonial purpose rather than a focused goal of consensus. The weekly status meeting is an obvious example. Though its goal may seem to be status reporting, its real intent is status confirming. And it’s not the status of the work, but the status of the boss. (Location 2968)
Meetings are not the only way that people’s time gets wasted. When staff is brought on too quickly at the beginning of a project, there is almost always a waste of people’s time. (Location 2975)
Projects begin with planning and design, activities that are best carried out by a smallish team. When design is important (as it is for anything but a simple formula project), it can require as much as half the full project duration. (Location 2978)
Fragmented time is almost certain to be teamicidal, but it also has another insidious effect: It is guaranteed to waste the individual’s time. A worker with multiple assignments—a little new development, some maintenance of a legacy product, some sales support, and perhaps a bit of end user hand-holding—will spend a significant part of each day switching gears. This time is largely invisible. (Location 3007)
When you over-coordinate the people who work for you, they’re all too likely to under-coordinate their own efforts. But self-coordination and mutual coordination among peers is the hallmark of graceful teamwork. (Location 3043)
A decent coach understands that his or her job is not to coordinate interaction, but to help people learn to self-coordinate. We think that’s the job of a knowledge-work manager as well. (Location 3046)
most of the spam in your In-box comes from co-workers. Of course, you’re not used to thinking of such messages as spam, but most of them are. Any message that is sent to one person with copies to half a dozen or more other recipients is candidate spam. The person it was directed to probably needed to see it, but how about the others? Were you on the receiving end because some action was required of you, or were you just included FYI? (Location 3051)
One of the reasons that organizations are bogged down with everybody plowing through endless numbers of endless e-mails is that there is an unwritten rule at work. The rule is, Silence gives consent. (Location 3075)
An effective repeal—establishing that only explicit consent gives consent—could save your organization person-centuries of wasted time. (Location 3082)
Telling someone what to do is easy, while instilling self-coordinating abilities in that same person is much more complicated. But it pays off in the long run. If you need to puzzle long and hard over how to make it happen, remember that’s why you make the big bucks. (Location 3091)
“People hate change … and that’s because people hate change… . I want to be sure that you get my point. People really hate change. They really, really do.”—Steve McMenamin Principal, The Atlantic Systems Guild (Location 3094)
More than being just system builders, we are change agents. Every time we deliver a new system, we are obliging people to change the way they do their work; we might be redefining their jobs entirely. (Location 3104)
And it should be considered that nothing is more difficult to handle, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage, than to put oneself at the head of introducing new orders. For the introducer has all those who benefit from the old orders as enemies, and he has lukewarm defenders in all those who might benefit from the new orders.—Niccolò Machiavelli (1513) 1 1. N. Machiavelli, The Prince, (Location 3108)
“For the introducer has all those who benefit from the old orders as enemies, and he has lukewarm defenders in all those who might benefit from the new orders.” Notice the equation is unbalanced against change. While you risk making enemies of those who have mastered the old ways—you are forcing them back to the uncomfortable position of novice—you receive only minor support from those who would gain. Why is that? Why are those who stand most to gain from the change still half-hearted in their support? That’s because people hate change. When we start out to change, it is never certain that we will succeed. And the uncertainty is more compelling than the potential for gain. (Location 3119)
Jerry Johnson, one-time director of the Menninger Foundation, has proposed that there is a pattern to this variety, something he calls the “Resistance-to-Change Continuum.” It looks like Figure 34–1. (Location 3133)
Johnson asserts that the Believers But Questioners are the only meaningful potential allies of any change. The two extremes, Blindly Loyal and Militantly Opposed, are the real enemies. The success of your change will depend on how you manage the Believers But Questioners. Don’t count on logic, by the way, as your trump card: These on-the-fence, maybe-baby allies are never going to be swayed solely by a rational discussion of why the proposed new way will be so much better than the current situation. (Location 3145)
The way most of us tend to think about change is depicted in Figure 34–2. Figure 34–2 Naïve model of how change happens. In this (naïve) view, an idea, a simple vision of “a better way” to do things, effects a direct change from the old to the new. (Location 3165)
Figure 34–3 Satir Change Model. Change involves at least the four stages shown in Figure 34–3, never fewer. There is no chance of effecting meaningful change without going through the two intermediate stages. (Location 3172)
According to Satir’s model, change happens upon the introduction of a foreign element: a catalyst for change. Without a catalyst, there is no recognition of the desirability of change. The foreign element can be an outside force or it can be the recognition that your world has somehow changed. Outside force: A measurement consultant walks into your office and announces that your company is performing in the lower quartile of all companies in your industry. Hmmmm. OR The world changes: The quarterly sales of your flagship product drop for the very first time in its history. (Location 3175)
When you try to institute change, the first thing you hit is Chaos. You’ve been there before. It’s when you are convinced that you are worse off than before with this new tool, new procedure, or new technique. People are saying things like, “If we just jettison this new stuff, maybe we’ll get back on schedule… .” You are suffering from the dip in the learning curve, and the assessment that the change is the problem may well be right, at least for the moment. You are worse off, for now. This is part of the reason why response to change is so emotional. It is frustrating and embarrassing to abandon approaches and methods you have long since mastered, only to become a novice again. (Location 3181)
The Practice-and-Integration phase occurs on the upswing of the learning curve. You are not yet completely comfortable as you are not yet proficient at the new, but you perceive that the new is now beginning to pay off or at least to show promise. You have reached the New Status Quo when what you changed to becomes what you do. An interesting characteristic of human emotion is that the more painful the Chaos, the greater the perceived value of the New Status Quo—if you can get there. (Location 3190)
The reason the Satir model is so important is that it alerts us that Chaos is an integral part of change. With the more naïve two-stage model, we don’t expect Chaos. When it occurs, we mistake it for the New Status Quo. And since the New Status Quo seems so chaotic, we think, “Whoops, looks like we blew it; let’s change back.” The change-back message is bound to be heard loud and clear in the middle of any ambitious change. When you’re looking for it, your chances of dealing sensibly with it are much improved. (Location 3194)
Change won’t even get started unless people feel safe—and people feel safe when they know they will not be demeaned or degraded for proposing a change, or trying to get through one. (Location 3199)
Paradoxically, change only has a chance of succeeding if failure—at least a little bit of failure—is also okay. (Location 3212)
Experience gets turned into learning when an organization alters itself to take account of what experience has shown. This alteration takes two forms, which are different enough to talk about separately: The organization instills new skills and approaches in its people. OR The organization redesigns itself to operate in some different manner. (Location 3230)
Learning is limited by an organization’s ability to keep its people. (Location 3239)
If the key learning doesn’t happen at the top and it doesn’t happen at the bottom, then it has to occur somewhere in the middle. That means the most natural learning center for most organizations is at the level of that much-maligned institution, middle management. This squares exactly with our own observation that successful learning organizations are always characterized by strong middle management. (Location 3263)
It’s worth pointing out that downsizings, when they happen, are almost always targeted at middle management. In other words, the proverbial “tightening ship” activity that has its vogue every few years is often at the expense of organizational learning. After such an exercise, an organization’s learning center may be destroyed. (Location 3267)
In order for a vital learning center to form, middle managers must communicate with each other and learn to work together in effective harmony. This is an extremely rare phenomenon. (Location 3272)
Almost all companies have something they call the Management Team, typically made up of middle-management peers. As we observed earlier, applying the word team to a group doesn’t assure that it will have any of the characteristics of a team. It may still be a poorly knit collection of individuals who have no common goals, common values, or blended skills. This is usually the case with most so-called management teams. (Location 3274)
“teams” of managers: Group members are made defensive, burdened by bureaucracy, assigned fragmented tasks, physically separated, pressured to work overtime, and goaded into competition with each other. With all that going against them, they are unlikely to merge into a meaningful whole. (Location 3279)
To make matters worse, they don’t have the one thing that any team needs in order to jell: common ownership of the work product. Anything that gets accomplished in such a group is likely to be the accomplishment of one of its members, not the group as a whole. The more competitive the managers are, the more pronounced this effect. We have even encountered extreme cases in which the rule was: “If something looks good, grab it; if you can’t grab it, kill it.” (Location 3281)
The most likely learning center for any sizable organization is the white space that lies between and among middle managers. If this white space becomes a vital channel of communication, if middle managers can act together as the redesigners of the organization, sharing a common stake in the result, then the benefits of learning are likely to be realized. If, on the other hand, the white space is empty of communication and common purpose, learning comes to a standstill. Organizations in which middle managers are isolated, embattled, and fearful are nonstarters in this respect. (Location 3287)
The science of making communities, making them healthy and satisfying for all, is called politics. We hasten to add that it’s not the shameless shenanigans of corporate infighting that we’re going to address here; those are the pathologies of politics. What we need to look at instead is “Politics, the Noble Science,” as first described by Aristotle. (Location 3311)
Aristotle included Politics among the five interlinked Noble Sciences that together make up Philosophy. The five are, • Metaphysics: the study of existence, the nature of the universe and all its contents • Logic: the ways we may know something, the set of permissible conclusions we may draw based on our perceptions, and some sensible rules of deduction and inference • Ethics: what we know about man and what we may deduce and infer (through Logic) about acceptable interactions between pairs of individuals • Politics: how we may logically extend Ethics to the larger group, the science of creating and managing such groups consistent with ethical behavior and logical recognition of the metaphysical entities—humans and the community made up of humans • Aesthetics: the appreciation of symbols and images of metaphysical reality, which are pleasing to the extent that they are logically consistent and that they inform us about ethical interaction and/ or political harmony (Location 3314)
Aristotelian Politics is the key practice of good management. Refusing to be political in the Aristotelian sense is disastrous; it is an abnegation of the manager’s real responsibility. Similarly, senior workers at all levels share some responsibility for community-building. They are the elders of whatever community does form. (Location 3325)
An organization that succeeds in building a satisfying community tends to keep its people. When the sense of community is strong enough, no one wants to leave. The investment made in human capital is thus retained, and upper management finds itself willing to invest more. When the company invests more in its people, the people perform better and feel better about themselves and about their company. This makes them still less likely to move on. The positive reinforcement here is all to the good. (Location 3328)
Of course, even the best sense of on-the-job community doesn’t assure that you will keep all your people forever. Some will know they have to leave to advance their own careers or for whatever other reason. However, when people do leave such an organization, they tend to time their departures to minimally inconvenience the community. This is an extraordinary boon to anyone doing project work, since it means that workers are unlikely to leave during the project. This effect alone, of departing only at project end, is worth more than all the process improvement your organization is likely to make over the next decade. (Location 3332)
a policy of constructive reintroduction of small amounts of disorder. Once the idea is stated so baldly, it’s simple enough to compile a list of ways to implement this policy: • Pilot projects • War games • Brainstorming • Provocative training experiences • Training, trips, conferences, celebrations, and retreats (Location 3392)
pilot project is one in which you set the fat book of standards aside and try some new and unproved technique. (Location 3401)
Our experience is that pilot projects, projects that try out any modified approach, tend toward higher-than-average net productivity. That means you’re likely to spend less money on a given project if you choose to run it as a pilot project with some new technique. (Location 3407)
Should all projects therefore be pilot projects? Your organization would be in good company if it adopted that policy, sharing it with Fujitsu, parts of the Southern Company, and some divisions of IBM. In any event, it makes far more sense to run all projects as pilots than to run no projects as pilots. (Location 3409)
What present-day standardization has achieved is a documentary consistency among products, but nothing approaching meaningful functional consistency. In other words, standardization has mainly homogenized the paperwork associated with the products, rather than the products themselves. If the paper trail left by the project were a little different from standard, the added inconvenience would be small. (Location 3419)
One caveat about pilot projects: Don’t experiment with more than one aspect of development technology on any given project. For all the talk about the importance of standards, it’s surprising how often managers abandon all standards on the rare project that is designated a pilot. They often try out new hardware, new software, new quality control procedures, matrix management, and new prototyping techniques, all on the same project. (Location 3423)
sensible approach to pilot projects is that they each be allowed to tinker with one component of the process. In the healthiest environment, project personnel would understand that they are encouraged to experiment with some single new technique on each project, but nonetheless expected to respect standards in other areas. (Location 3426)
Brainstorming is a structured interactive session, specifically targeted on creative insight. Up to half a dozen people get together to focus on a relevant problem. The rules of the session and the ploys used by the person in charge help to make it an enjoyable and disorderly experience, and often a truly rewarding one. (Location 3473)
The chance that workers relish most is one combining travel with their peers and a one-of-a-kind experience. It might be going off together for a training session, particularly a provocative one, or taking in the International Conference On Whatever. All the better if the travel is to someplace exotic. (Location 3486)
It’s hardly hot news these days that lots of our peers are working as cottage-industry entrepreneurs. They contract their time by the day, week, or even years for programming or design work or, sometimes, management. There are agencies that specialize in connecting these independents with organizations that need their talents. (Location 3516)
if your corporation is fortunate enough to have a self-motivated super-achiever on board, it’s enough to say, “Define your own job.” Our colleague Steve McMenamin characterizes these workers as “free electrons,” since they have a strong role in choosing their own orbits. (Location 3531)
The trend to create an increasing number of free electron positions is more than just a response to the threat of the cottage industry. The reason there are so many gurus and fellows and intrapreneurs and internal consultants in healthy modern companies is quite simply that companies profit from them. The people in these positions contribute disproportionately to the organizations that employ them. They are motivated to make the positions created for them pay off for their companies. (Location 3533)
The mark of the best manager is an ability to single out the few key spirits who have the proper mix of perspective and maturity and then turn them loose. Such a manager knows that he or she really can’t give direction to these natural free electrons. (Location 3563)
