9/3/2007
The Secret is a popular, and therefore self-contradictory book: If you can buy it on Amazon.com, how secret can it be?
Someone who read The Secret let me in on it. It resembles the movie What the Bleep do We Know? -- a new age spin on quantum physics.
It starts with what by now is well worn. A quantum event, such as the radioactive decay of an atomic nucleus, is intrinsically random. Until an observer sees the outcome, the universe simultaneously exists in two "superposed" states -- in one the nucleus has decayed, in the other it has not. The act of observation collapses the two states back into a single reality in which the nucleus either did or did not decay.
That's when it all goes wrong. The Secret is that through concentration you can take advantage of this principle to make random events come out your way.
Which leads to the question: If two people both know The Secret and concentrate in opposite directions, then what?
It also leads to the more important question, Weren't you paying attention when you read the phrase, "intrinsically random?" If an observer can choose the outcome of an event it isn't intrinsically random anymore.
It's a nice theory, though. It stands up to the two tests most Americans and far too many business leaders apply to such ideas: It (1) is more convenient than the way the world really works, and (2) fits their preconceived notions.
It sure would be handy if The Secret worked as advertised. If it did, instead of my typical stock picks' habit of plummeting like poisoned pigeons, they would soar like celestial seraphim.
Want to know a real secret? It's that there is no secret. The best way to forecast the future is to make it happen. You won't achieve this by concentrating your will to influence quantum events. You'll achieve it by concentrating your efforts and the efforts of those working for you to make them happen.
Here's a handy-dandy formula that can help: 3, 1, 3, 4. By the numbers:
3-year vision: This is what you want your organization to be and to accomplish. You should be able to explain it in clear, direct terms. This isn't the place for nuance.
And if you're a loophole sort of person, sorry, run-on sentences are cheating.
An example, if you're looking for one: "In three years, IT will be the company's partner in designing change and a leader in making it happen."
1-year strategy: This is the one-year down payment on your three-year vision. As is the case for your vision, you should also be able to express your strategy in one or two simple declarative sentences:
"This year, our goal is to achieve a 'culture of discipline' -- a shared way of thinking and acting that means every employee makes good decisions instead of managers having to enforce them through oversight."
3-month goals: Here's where it starts to become real. Anyone can look out three years, or even one year, and articulate brilliant outcomes. Three months is another matter. Three months is urgent. It's immediate. It's hard to escape.
Developing goals for the next three months isn't particularly challenging. What's difficult is figuring out a list that moves you toward your one-year strategy. My best advice: Don't worry about it at first. Getting in the habit of putting down any list of three-month goals is an interesting enough challenge. Once you've started you can refine it.
4 -week plan: This is where the rubber meets the road. It's what you intend to achieve each week for the next month to make sure your three-month goals turn into accomplishments at a steady pace.
I've said "your vision, your strategy, your goals and your plan." If that's all they are, you'll fail. Your management team has to embrace the vision and strategy -- it has to be theirs. The goals have to be their goals even more than they are your goals, and the plan isn't a plan at all -- it's the composite of their individual plans, shared so that everyone knows what anyone knows.
What's left is checking off the details as you complete them. That and all the hard work of making it happen.
Don't make the mistake of minimizing the hard work, just because other people have to do it. Compared to it, all of your planning is pretty easy.
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Copyright and other stuff -- The great KJR link point
Showing posts with label KJR. Show all posts
Showing posts with label KJR. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
More bridge lessons
2007Aug25
The story of the Brooklyn Bridge -- in the late 19th century the longest and largest suspension bridge ever attempted -- is as dramatic as any fiction. As chronicled in David McCullough's phenomenal The Great Bridge (1972) it has heroes, villains, excitement, setbacks, and ultimately triumph.
Engineers were the heroes, starting with John Roebling, the greatest bridge-builder of his time, who conceived the bridge, served as architect, and organized the effort to charter a bridge company.
Also his son, Washington Roebling, a Civil War hero who in his mid-twenties took over as Chief Engineer on his father's untimely death. It was Washington Roebling who worked out every last engineering detail, and who recruited a fine engineering team to oversee the work -- a team that, with only one resignation, remained in place for the fourteen years required to build the bridge.
A third Roebling was as important: Emily, Washington Roebling's wife. When a severe case of the bends ruined her husband's health (brought from too many hours breathing compressed air under the river, overseeing installation of the caissons on which the bridge rests), it was Emily who turned his dictated instructions into detailed written specifications, worked personally with the engineering team, reported progress and challenges back to her husband, and in general acted as second-in-command throughout most of the project.
The politicians of the day were the villains. Boss Tweed and his New York political machine were the most publicly detestable. The most vile, though, were board members who awarded the cable manufacturing contract to a crony who then delivered, quite deliberately, defective steel wire to the construction site.
No summary can do the book justice. Read it. When you've finished, you'll understand that today's politicians are nothing new. That doesn't mean their lack of public courage is any more acceptable. It simply reinforces what we already know: Engineers create things that are new; politicians repeat the same old patterns, century after century, ad nauseum.
In the 1970s and preceding decades, the United States invested 3 percent of GDP on infrastructure. Since 1980 we've spent one third less and our infrastructure is deteriorating. It's a pattern that is, by now, familiar: Politicians sell taxpayers on the idea that tax cuts are free. We just need to eliminate waste and be smarter about priorities.
Here's another pattern: Bad logic about risk.
According to the Star Tribune's investigative reporting, the engineers who last inspected the 35W bridge in Minneapolis prior to its collapse identified 52 steel beams at risk of cracking. They were sufficiently concerned to consider condemning the bridge, and recommended emergency measures to reinforce it.
Shortly before the project began, though, the same engineers reviewed their emergency measures and decided they carried too much risk of their own. The non-engineers who set policy in cases like this decided this meant doing nothing (ManagementSpeak: Developing "a more cost effective approach") was a fine course of action.
One more pattern: Bad math when it comes to risk.
Imagine the risk of the 35W bridge's collapse was 0.001%. That's sufficiently remote that few would worry.
We know, though, that about 100,000 bridges have been rated the same or worse than the 35W bridge before its collapse. That would mean we have a 10% chance, every year, of another catastrophic bridge failure.
We don't know the actual risks. If anyone does turn bridge ratings into probabilities of failure, it's well hidden. One wonders why.
What does this have to do with keeping the joint running? Everything. You deal with the exact same challenges every day:
It's to establish strong enough working relationships throughout the business to be persuasive, to communicate risk and its consequences accurately enough to prevent its turning into reality.
Much harder.
[Previous realted post]
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Copyright and other stuff -- The great KJR link point
The story of the Brooklyn Bridge -- in the late 19th century the longest and largest suspension bridge ever attempted -- is as dramatic as any fiction. As chronicled in David McCullough's phenomenal The Great Bridge (1972) it has heroes, villains, excitement, setbacks, and ultimately triumph.
Engineers were the heroes, starting with John Roebling, the greatest bridge-builder of his time, who conceived the bridge, served as architect, and organized the effort to charter a bridge company.
Also his son, Washington Roebling, a Civil War hero who in his mid-twenties took over as Chief Engineer on his father's untimely death. It was Washington Roebling who worked out every last engineering detail, and who recruited a fine engineering team to oversee the work -- a team that, with only one resignation, remained in place for the fourteen years required to build the bridge.
A third Roebling was as important: Emily, Washington Roebling's wife. When a severe case of the bends ruined her husband's health (brought from too many hours breathing compressed air under the river, overseeing installation of the caissons on which the bridge rests), it was Emily who turned his dictated instructions into detailed written specifications, worked personally with the engineering team, reported progress and challenges back to her husband, and in general acted as second-in-command throughout most of the project.
The politicians of the day were the villains. Boss Tweed and his New York political machine were the most publicly detestable. The most vile, though, were board members who awarded the cable manufacturing contract to a crony who then delivered, quite deliberately, defective steel wire to the construction site.
No summary can do the book justice. Read it. When you've finished, you'll understand that today's politicians are nothing new. That doesn't mean their lack of public courage is any more acceptable. It simply reinforces what we already know: Engineers create things that are new; politicians repeat the same old patterns, century after century, ad nauseum.
In the 1970s and preceding decades, the United States invested 3 percent of GDP on infrastructure. Since 1980 we've spent one third less and our infrastructure is deteriorating. It's a pattern that is, by now, familiar: Politicians sell taxpayers on the idea that tax cuts are free. We just need to eliminate waste and be smarter about priorities.
Here's another pattern: Bad logic about risk.
According to the Star Tribune's investigative reporting, the engineers who last inspected the 35W bridge in Minneapolis prior to its collapse identified 52 steel beams at risk of cracking. They were sufficiently concerned to consider condemning the bridge, and recommended emergency measures to reinforce it.
Shortly before the project began, though, the same engineers reviewed their emergency measures and decided they carried too much risk of their own. The non-engineers who set policy in cases like this decided this meant doing nothing (ManagementSpeak: Developing "a more cost effective approach") was a fine course of action.
One more pattern: Bad math when it comes to risk.
Imagine the risk of the 35W bridge's collapse was 0.001%. That's sufficiently remote that few would worry.
We know, though, that about 100,000 bridges have been rated the same or worse than the 35W bridge before its collapse. That would mean we have a 10% chance, every year, of another catastrophic bridge failure.
We don't know the actual risks. If anyone does turn bridge ratings into probabilities of failure, it's well hidden. One wonders why.
What does this have to do with keeping the joint running? Everything. You deal with the exact same challenges every day:
- Do more with less: Most CIOs have been handed budget cuts, then told there's plenty of money -- they just have to eliminate waste and set more effective priorities.
- Bad logic: Bridge engineers aren't the only ones who find flaws in proposed solutions, only to be told that if that's the case there's no problem to solve.
- Bad math: An easy-to-handle example illustrates: If the risk of one server failing is 0.01% on any given day, the situation sounds manageable. Unless you have 1,000 servers in your data center.
It's to establish strong enough working relationships throughout the business to be persuasive, to communicate risk and its consequences accurately enough to prevent its turning into reality.
Much harder.
[Previous realted post]
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Copyright and other stuff -- The great KJR link point
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
Fine whine is meant to be shared
Of risk, bridges and business 2007Aug6
Tom Clancy, in A Sum of All Fears, offered this smug assessment:
The Roman bridges of antiquity were very inefficient structures. By modern standards, they used too much stone, and as a result, far too much labor to build. Over the years we have learned to build bridges more efficiently, using fewer materials and less labor to perform the same task.Seven years ago, InfoWorld published this response in KJR's predecessor, the Survival Guide (The sum of all projects)
... some of those Roman bridges are still standing a millennium later, while some of our more efficient ones have tumbled into the bay. Adherence to budgets and schedules is our preeminent ethic. One suspects Rome held different values.Last week, another American bridge, just 40 years old, tumbled into the Mississippi river in the middle of Minneapolis. Those built by the Romans continue to stand.
What exactly went wrong in Minneapolis isn't yet certain. We do know already that recent inspections of the bridge did not report that all was well. They reported risk.
The state of MN, my home state, has underinvested in its transportation infrastructure for at least 25 of the last 25 years.
So has the rest of the country. We have no reason to believe the 35W bridge collapse will be the only consequence. Current estimates suggest we'll need to spend $10 billion a year for 20 years to catch up just on bridge maintenance. That will require new taxes. Do you think many voters would support a preventive maintenance platform, should one party or another be to propose it?
In the meantime, roughly 150,000 bridges have a similar risk of failure.
For those who propose the BIG/GAS theory (Business Is Great/Government and Academics are Stupid) as the culprit -- don't even think about it. Business leaders are at least as prone to the same thinking. As a recent KJR explained (The value of a little failure here and there,), they are far more likely to invest in revenue enhancement or cost reduction than in addressing risk, because investments in revenue enhancement and cost reduction yield tangible returns.
In that column I used risk mitigation to cover all ways of handling risk. Two correspondents -- Tom Reid and Max Fritzler -- recommended a different vocabulary and a more sophisticated way to think about the subject.
The proper cover term, which will be used here from now on, is "risk management." To manage risk you can Avoid, Insure, or Mitigate (Max supplied the acronym, AIM).
Avoidance means reducing the likelihood that the risk will become an event. Preventive maintenance is one of the most important ways to avoid risk. Staff training, to increase competence, is another.
Insurance includes all tactics that deflect the consequences of risk to someone else. Insurance is the label because that's the best-known way to deflect the consequences of risk, but there is another. It's called blame-shifting and it's quite a popular alternative. Quite a bit of political propaganda goes into blame-shifting. In business, backstabbing often has the same goal. Both are annoyingly effective at deflecting the consequences of risk.
Mitigation means reducing the impact should the risk turn into actual events. Fault-tolerant system design and business recovery planning are well-known risk mitigation tactics. So are cross-training and succession planning.
There is, of course, a fourth risk management tactic. It's probably the most popular of them all. It's called hoping.
Synonyms are keeping your fingers crossed and denial. Theoretically, you can also accept the risk -- consciously choose to do nothing. Usually, though, acceptance is just another synonym for hoping.
Denial has an antidote -- developing a culture of honest inquiry. It's how you get an accurate assessment of risk.
It is, perhaps, the most difficult change in business culture you can attempt. You have to constantly and insistently ask,
Are the data we have trustworthy? Complete? Can we get better data? Are we drawing the right inferences? Will they lead to the results we want?And then,
Do the data say our decisions gave us the results we want? If not, what did we miss? What was wrong about our inferences and decisions? What will we do differently next time?Tough questions.
You'll note that most risk management fits our definition of a decision -- it requires the commitment of time, staff and money. The exceptions are blame-shifting and hoping, which don't.
Is it any wonder, then, that blame-shifting and hoping are the most common risk management strategies in America today?
Or that another American bridge has crumbled?
Copyright and other stuff -- The great KJR link point
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
The new prudes
You can't change people. You sometimes can change their targets.
So it is that while prudes will always be prudes -- obsessed with the notion that someone, somewhere, might be having fun -- what they are prudish about can and will change over time.
When I was a boy, a peculiar amount of time and energy went into prohibiting consenting adults from doing what they wanted to do together. While still popular in some circles, this form of prudishness is far less prevalent these days.
That's the good news, and if someone ever introduced a Constitutional amendment that reads, "Congress shall make no laws defining crimes without victims or criminalizing acts undertaken solely between or among consenting adults," I'd expect it to receive widespread support.
The bad news: The prudes are still among us. They live in IT organizations. You can recognize them easily. They're the ones who say, "Rules are rules, and we have to enforce them."
It's an argument that falls apart on even the slightest scrutiny but scrutiny is something prudes mostly reserve for the behavior of other people. Self-righteousness, not analysis, is their stock in trade.
These thoughts occurred to me as I read my e-mail following last week's column ("Roving e-mail," Keep the Joint Running, 7/2/2007), which presented the imprudence of harshly punishing violations of various corporate usage policies (such as using private e-mail accounts for business purposes).
These are the new prudes, and I'm tired of listening to them. Tired, that is, of those who self-righteously deride anyone who uses their PC for more than word processing, spreadsheets, electronic mail, Internet browsing, and the official list of enterprise applications.
We have PCs that can sing, dance, and play the tuba. The list of what they can do for us is like Einstein's universe: Finite, but unbounded.
As specifics are more persuasive than generalities, here are some applications I use on a regular basis, which make me significantly more effective in my work. Installing them would be, in many companies, grounds for disciplinary action:
Here's a suggestion: Instead of employing professional prudes to prevent end-users from finding better and more productive uses for information technology, show some leadership instead. Give someone the job of developing the richest set of tools possible for your company's PCs, and the job of promoting their use.
The job title? I must be in the wrong mood, because everything that occurs to me right now would make at least some readers snigger.
Suggestions?
So it is that while prudes will always be prudes -- obsessed with the notion that someone, somewhere, might be having fun -- what they are prudish about can and will change over time.
When I was a boy, a peculiar amount of time and energy went into prohibiting consenting adults from doing what they wanted to do together. While still popular in some circles, this form of prudishness is far less prevalent these days.
That's the good news, and if someone ever introduced a Constitutional amendment that reads, "Congress shall make no laws defining crimes without victims or criminalizing acts undertaken solely between or among consenting adults," I'd expect it to receive widespread support.
The bad news: The prudes are still among us. They live in IT organizations. You can recognize them easily. They're the ones who say, "Rules are rules, and we have to enforce them."
It's an argument that falls apart on even the slightest scrutiny but scrutiny is something prudes mostly reserve for the behavior of other people. Self-righteousness, not analysis, is their stock in trade.
These thoughts occurred to me as I read my e-mail following last week's column ("Roving e-mail," Keep the Joint Running, 7/2/2007), which presented the imprudence of harshly punishing violations of various corporate usage policies (such as using private e-mail accounts for business purposes).
These are the new prudes, and I'm tired of listening to them. Tired, that is, of those who self-righteously deride anyone who uses their PC for more than word processing, spreadsheets, electronic mail, Internet browsing, and the official list of enterprise applications.
We have PCs that can sing, dance, and play the tuba. The list of what they can do for us is like Einstein's universe: Finite, but unbounded.
As specifics are more persuasive than generalities, here are some applications I use on a regular basis, which make me significantly more effective in my work. Installing them would be, in many companies, grounds for disciplinary action:
- Copernic Desktop Search: Until I migrated to Vista (DON'T DO IT! YOU'LL REGRET IT!!!) Copernic was how I quickly found the files and e-mails I was looking for. I like it even more than Google Desktop.
- InfoSelect: The best personal information manager in the world, so far as I'm concerned. You can use it to create outlines, notes, and flat-file databases and find whatever you're looking for in an eyeblink. I use it to store all the random bits of information I need to stash somewhere. And, it has a version for Palm, so I can find the information when I'm out and about.
- Desktop Sidebar: Similar to Google Desktop's sidebar, and infinitely better than Vista's visually appealing but space-intensive clunker, I find Desktop Sidebar to be a terrific way to keep the weather, stocks, and blogs I track right in front of me. It's compact, stable, and ... nifty.
- Treo/Blackberry: Yes, there are still a lot of companies that don't let you connect a Treo or Blackberry to your PC or laptop. I can e-mail or call anyone in my Outlook address book from my Treo. Their employees can't.
- Digital camera: We do a lot of whiteboard work with clients. When the whiteboard is full we take its picture. It's cheaper than a "smart board," ubiquitous, and we can store the original electronically. Many companies wouldn't let us upload the pictures.
- Allway Sync: I don't know if it's better or worse than any other file synchronization tool. It works for me. It keeps track of parallel folder trees on different drives or computers, recognizing new files, changed files, and deletions. Simple and painless.
Here's a suggestion: Instead of employing professional prudes to prevent end-users from finding better and more productive uses for information technology, show some leadership instead. Give someone the job of developing the richest set of tools possible for your company's PCs, and the job of promoting their use.
The job title? I must be in the wrong mood, because everything that occurs to me right now would make at least some readers snigger.
Suggestions?
Thursday, July 5, 2007
Roving e-mail
That members of the Bush administration used Republican National Committee e-mail accounts instead of their official government accounts leads to troubling questions.
No, not the troubling legal and ethical questions. They aren't KJR material. If you're looking for self-righteous indignation on that subject, plenty of political blogs have already plowed that field.
Here at KJR we rarely indulge in self-righteous indignation. Our preferred vices are sarcasm and irony. With that in mind:
Many in the IT punditocracy have made much of the RNC's amateurish systems management. It's clear system security and recoverability went well beyond dreadful.
This is no academic concern. The RNC acknowledges it lost hundreds of thousands of e-mail messages and can't get them back. Unless you interpret the loss as the result of malicious intent, it's difficult to explain away the problem as anything other than total incompetence. (And can you imagine how frustrating it must for Karl Rove that he can't retrieve his e-mail archives?)
But that isn't a proper KJR subject either. Well, it is, actually, but not this week. You'll have to wade through another few paragraphs for the point to emerge, though, because, elsewhere in the news:
Gloria Long Rollins, Town Manager of Walkersville MD, removed the toilet paper from all restrooms in the town's parks. Vandals, you see, had set some paper on fire in a men's bathroom. And so, to combat vandalism, graffiti and drug use in the parks, visitors will henceforth have to bring their own, whether it's toilet paper, spray paint, drugs or kindling.
Here's the connection, and its relevance: Bush administration members aren't alone in ignoring the official systems IT provides them, and Gloria Rollins isn't alone in overreacting to irritating infractions of the rules. The combination is, to coin a phrase, a vicious cycle.
Okay, I didn't really coin the phrase. Still, it is a cycle and it is vicious. Please make allowances.
The Bush-league question for KJR readers is how many business users in your company make use of Gmail, Yahoo! Mail!, or Hotmail for business use, and why. The Walkersville question is how you respond when they do.
Here's the usual response. I'm sure someone somewhere calls it a best practice:
1. IT writes a policy making the use of private e-mail accounts illegal.
2. IT explains to all managers and staff that this is the policy, and that failing to adhere to it will result in disciplinary action, up to and including termination.
3. Someone actually enforces the policy, including termination, proving that in more than one small village, the local idiot has gone missing.
It isn't that the use of private e-mail accounts is a good idea. Of course it isn't, as the RNC was kind enough to demonstrate.
It's that the proper response isn't to remove the metaphorical toilet paper. It's better to ask the offending parties, in a friendly, engaging, and entirely unthreatening tone of voice, "So ... er ... when you compare Gmail to our corporate e-mail system, why do you like Gmail better?"
And then, when they tell you ("Gmail gives me gigabytes of storage. You don't."), take what they say seriously.
E-mail is just one example of this common phenomenon: If end-users don't like the systems you provide, many will find alternatives they like better. If they hate your BPM (business process management) system they'll put together their own tracking sheets in Excel. If they detest your locked-down PCs they'll buy their own Macintoshes.
And if they hate your CRM system ("customer relationship management," but it's a poor use of the term) they'll use Salesforce.com, or install Act!
(Not that it matters, but if Yahoo! was to host Act!, where would it put the exclamation points? Oh, never mind.)
For some unaccountable reason, instead of assuming these employees come to the office wanting to succeed at their jobs, many in IT assume they're malicious vandals who in other circumstances would set fire to the toilet paper in Walkersville's public restrooms.
I don't want to push the metaphor too far. I'm not saying Gloria Rollins should have asked her vandals whether they were mad because she didn't buy Charmin. Even if she had, I'm guessing the vandals would have been too drunk to answer.
So let's leave it at this: When the employees in your company try to avoid the systems you provide to make them more effective, find out why.
They have a reason. You need to know what it is. Then you can figure out what to do about it.
Other than firing them.
No, not the troubling legal and ethical questions. They aren't KJR material. If you're looking for self-righteous indignation on that subject, plenty of political blogs have already plowed that field.
Here at KJR we rarely indulge in self-righteous indignation. Our preferred vices are sarcasm and irony. With that in mind:
Many in the IT punditocracy have made much of the RNC's amateurish systems management. It's clear system security and recoverability went well beyond dreadful.
This is no academic concern. The RNC acknowledges it lost hundreds of thousands of e-mail messages and can't get them back. Unless you interpret the loss as the result of malicious intent, it's difficult to explain away the problem as anything other than total incompetence. (And can you imagine how frustrating it must for Karl Rove that he can't retrieve his e-mail archives?)
But that isn't a proper KJR subject either. Well, it is, actually, but not this week. You'll have to wade through another few paragraphs for the point to emerge, though, because, elsewhere in the news:
Gloria Long Rollins, Town Manager of Walkersville MD, removed the toilet paper from all restrooms in the town's parks. Vandals, you see, had set some paper on fire in a men's bathroom. And so, to combat vandalism, graffiti and drug use in the parks, visitors will henceforth have to bring their own, whether it's toilet paper, spray paint, drugs or kindling.
Here's the connection, and its relevance: Bush administration members aren't alone in ignoring the official systems IT provides them, and Gloria Rollins isn't alone in overreacting to irritating infractions of the rules. The combination is, to coin a phrase, a vicious cycle.
Okay, I didn't really coin the phrase. Still, it is a cycle and it is vicious. Please make allowances.
The Bush-league question for KJR readers is how many business users in your company make use of Gmail, Yahoo! Mail!, or Hotmail for business use, and why. The Walkersville question is how you respond when they do.
Here's the usual response. I'm sure someone somewhere calls it a best practice:
1. IT writes a policy making the use of private e-mail accounts illegal.
2. IT explains to all managers and staff that this is the policy, and that failing to adhere to it will result in disciplinary action, up to and including termination.
3. Someone actually enforces the policy, including termination, proving that in more than one small village, the local idiot has gone missing.
It isn't that the use of private e-mail accounts is a good idea. Of course it isn't, as the RNC was kind enough to demonstrate.
It's that the proper response isn't to remove the metaphorical toilet paper. It's better to ask the offending parties, in a friendly, engaging, and entirely unthreatening tone of voice, "So ... er ... when you compare Gmail to our corporate e-mail system, why do you like Gmail better?"
And then, when they tell you ("Gmail gives me gigabytes of storage. You don't."), take what they say seriously.
E-mail is just one example of this common phenomenon: If end-users don't like the systems you provide, many will find alternatives they like better. If they hate your BPM (business process management) system they'll put together their own tracking sheets in Excel. If they detest your locked-down PCs they'll buy their own Macintoshes.
And if they hate your CRM system ("customer relationship management," but it's a poor use of the term) they'll use Salesforce.com, or install Act!
(Not that it matters, but if Yahoo! was to host Act!, where would it put the exclamation points? Oh, never mind.)
For some unaccountable reason, instead of assuming these employees come to the office wanting to succeed at their jobs, many in IT assume they're malicious vandals who in other circumstances would set fire to the toilet paper in Walkersville's public restrooms.
I don't want to push the metaphor too far. I'm not saying Gloria Rollins should have asked her vandals whether they were mad because she didn't buy Charmin. Even if she had, I'm guessing the vandals would have been too drunk to answer.
So let's leave it at this: When the employees in your company try to avoid the systems you provide to make them more effective, find out why.
They have a reason. You need to know what it is. Then you can figure out what to do about it.
Other than firing them.
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
To err is human. Then what?
2/12/2007
ManagementSpeak: He has been given opportunities to excel in a number of different roles in the organization.
Translation: It's time to fire his worthless posterior.
This week's anonymous contributor excels in the art of mumbo jumbo translation.
You always test. The only question is whether you test before or after you put your software into production.
No, this column isn't about Windows Vista. Mathematicians haven't invented numbers small enough to describe the chance of my having anything original to say about it.
This column is about mistakes, and what to do when they happen.
Last week's column is a good example. It presented a formula for calculating the average span of control in a company: If a company has n management layers, the span of control is the nth root of the number of employees.
Close, but no cigar. Chris Miller was kind enough to explain that I should have analyzed the matter more closely.
Had I done so I would have recognized that it isn't quite that simple. For any number of layers (L) and span of control (S), the number of employees is actually (N) = S^0 + S^1+ ... + S^(L-1). (If you're really good you can turn this into the more compact formula: N = (S^(L+1)-1)/(S-1).)
There might be a way to solve this for S but I haven't found it. Instead, you can plug the formula into Excel and twiddle with values for S until the number of employees comes out right. The span of control for 5,000 employees with three, four and five management layers is about 16.75, 8.14 and 5.27 respectively (the numbers I published last week were 17.10, 8.41 and 5.49).
Does this matter? It depends. Had I described my results as a first-order approximation (see "The art of approximation," Keep the Joint Running, January 15, 2007) then it wouldn't matter a bit. Since I presented my results as being exact, though ...
Which brings up the question: What if I reported to you, and I'd made a mistake like this in some business analysis you'd asked me to prepare? It isn't difficult to enumerate your possible responses:
Coach the offending party regarding the need to be more careful: Coaching is a Good Thing in leadership circles. It gives employees guidance on the importance of doing better next time while avoiding the unpleasantness associated with punishing them.
The problem with coaching as it's usually practiced is that it's undirected and unspecific. The manager explains the importance of being more careful, expresses confidence in the employee's ability to do better, and ends the discussion convinced that positive outcomes will follow.
Usually, they won't, because why would they? Nothing has changed.
Hold the offending party accountable: This is ManagementSpeak for "inflict a suitable punishment." Do this and the offending party, along with everyone else in your organization, will probably become more careful and cautious, double-checking and triple-checking their work.
That's the upside. The downside: Most will hide their future mistakes from view, turn down difficult assignments or any whose results can be evaluated objectively, and energetically rationalize any mistakes you detect from here on in, arguing that they aren't mistakes after all. They aren't bugs, that is -- they're features.
Communicate your expectations clearly: "Holding people accountable" is a two-stage process. First you communicate a performance deficiency. Then you impose a penalty.
You'll get the desired results without the undesirable side effects if you content yourself with communicating. Explain the gap between the work product as the employee delivered it and your expectations.
Unless, that is, you think your employees come to work every day planning to mess things up. If you do, hold yourself accountable for hiring such losers.
Set high standards, publicly compliment employees who meet them, and inform employees, privately and professionally, when they fail to do so. Usually, that's all you have to do -- no punishment needed.
Institute compensating procedures, such as the two-pairs-of-eyes rule: Human beings are like Windows servers. If you want serious reliability you need to cluster.
I'll get the math right this time, because it's pretty simple. If one server is down, on the average, 0.1% of the time, then a cluster of two servers will be down only 0.0001% of the time (0.1% squared). That's a lot cheaper and easier than trying to get one server to achieve the equivalent level of reliability.
Humans make mistakes, especially when engaged in creative efforts. Two humans are less likely to both miss the same mistake than just one -- it's why professional publications use proofreaders and fact-checkers.
The employees in your organization are going to make mistakes. They are, after all, human beings and we humans are prone to imperfection.
The question is how you handle them when they happen.
Bob Lewis is president of IT Catalysts, Inc.
Copyright 2007, IS Survivor Publishing, all rights reserved.
ManagementSpeak: He has been given opportunities to excel in a number of different roles in the organization.
Translation: It's time to fire his worthless posterior.
This week's anonymous contributor excels in the art of mumbo jumbo translation.
You always test. The only question is whether you test before or after you put your software into production.
No, this column isn't about Windows Vista. Mathematicians haven't invented numbers small enough to describe the chance of my having anything original to say about it.
This column is about mistakes, and what to do when they happen.
Last week's column is a good example. It presented a formula for calculating the average span of control in a company: If a company has n management layers, the span of control is the nth root of the number of employees.
Close, but no cigar. Chris Miller was kind enough to explain that I should have analyzed the matter more closely.
Had I done so I would have recognized that it isn't quite that simple. For any number of layers (L) and span of control (S), the number of employees is actually (N) = S^0 + S^1+ ... + S^(L-1). (If you're really good you can turn this into the more compact formula: N = (S^(L+1)-1)/(S-1).)
There might be a way to solve this for S but I haven't found it. Instead, you can plug the formula into Excel and twiddle with values for S until the number of employees comes out right. The span of control for 5,000 employees with three, four and five management layers is about 16.75, 8.14 and 5.27 respectively (the numbers I published last week were 17.10, 8.41 and 5.49).
Does this matter? It depends. Had I described my results as a first-order approximation (see "The art of approximation," Keep the Joint Running, January 15, 2007) then it wouldn't matter a bit. Since I presented my results as being exact, though ...
Which brings up the question: What if I reported to you, and I'd made a mistake like this in some business analysis you'd asked me to prepare? It isn't difficult to enumerate your possible responses:
The problem with coaching as it's usually practiced is that it's undirected and unspecific. The manager explains the importance of being more careful, expresses confidence in the employee's ability to do better, and ends the discussion convinced that positive outcomes will follow.
Usually, they won't, because why would they? Nothing has changed.
That's the upside. The downside: Most will hide their future mistakes from view, turn down difficult assignments or any whose results can be evaluated objectively, and energetically rationalize any mistakes you detect from here on in, arguing that they aren't mistakes after all. They aren't bugs, that is -- they're features.
You'll get the desired results without the undesirable side effects if you content yourself with communicating. Explain the gap between the work product as the employee delivered it and your expectations.
Unless, that is, you think your employees come to work every day planning to mess things up. If you do, hold yourself accountable for hiring such losers.
Set high standards, publicly compliment employees who meet them, and inform employees, privately and professionally, when they fail to do so. Usually, that's all you have to do -- no punishment needed.
I'll get the math right this time, because it's pretty simple. If one server is down, on the average, 0.1% of the time, then a cluster of two servers will be down only 0.0001% of the time (0.1% squared). That's a lot cheaper and easier than trying to get one server to achieve the equivalent level of reliability.
Humans make mistakes, especially when engaged in creative efforts. Two humans are less likely to both miss the same mistake than just one -- it's why professional publications use proofreaders and fact-checkers.
The employees in your organization are going to make mistakes. They are, after all, human beings and we humans are prone to imperfection.
The question is how you handle them when they happen.
Bob Lewis is president of IT Catalysts, Inc.
Copyright 2007, IS Survivor Publishing, all rights reserved.
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
The mathematics of organizational dysfunction
1/22/2007
ManagementSpeak: Sounds great. Can you e-mail me the details?
Translation: I must remember to add you to my spam filter's blacklist.
KJR Club member Nicky Avery e-mailed me the translation.
Adios, Cingular.
So far as I can tell, AT&T just repurchased itself from itself for a lot of money. I'm sure that can't really be the case, though.
I just can't handle the math.
Math can be useful. It can help us understand when circumstances we don't like are built into the fabric of the space-time continuum. That's particularly handy for companies that have a blame-oriented culture and are wondering whose fault it is.
For example:
Combinatorials: I've mentioned the formula n(n-1)/2 before. You can use it to calculate the number of pairs of objects in any collection. It explains why an entrepreneurial startup venture can operate as a "band of brothers." Until, that is, it succeeds.
Imagine the startup consists of five old friends who know and trust each other. n(n-1)/2 means it contains 10 pairs of people. With only ten pairs, everyone can maintain trust; everyone knows what everyone else is good at, and the company operates smoothly.
So the company succeeds. Pretty soon it has 100 employees -- 4,950 pairs. There's simply no way every pair will exhibit mutual trust. Some pairs are total strangers; others consist of people who just plain don't like each other; who see each other as rivals; or otherwise can't work together effectively.
Surface area to volume ratio: Blow up a balloon -- for simplicity, imagine it's spherical. When it's an inch in radius, its rubber surface covers 12.566 square inches (4*pi*radius^2) and encloses a volume of 4.189 cubic inches (4/3*pi*radius^3). Surface Area/Volume = 3.
Blow up the balloon to a five inch radius. It now has a surface area of 314.159 square inches, and encloses 523.598 cubic inches. Surface Area/Volume = 0.6.
Small balloons have a lot of surface area for each unit of volume. Big ones have very little. It's why we're made out of many itty bitty cells instead of being big globs of protoplasm. The quantities of oxygen and nutrients cells need (and wastes they must dispose of) depends on how much stuff they contain -- their volume. Their surface area limits how fast they can exchange it all with the outside world.
If this still doesn't make sense, compare the five-inch balloon to 125 one-inch balloons. Both enclose about 524 cubic inches. The five-inch balloon contains it in 314 square inches of rubber. The 125 one-inch balloons need about 1,570 square inches -- five times the surface area.
It is because small objects have a much higher surface-area-to-volume ratio that iron dust is highly flammable while iron bars are not (nor do a prison make, not that it's relevant).
It also explains why it is that in small entrepreneurships, every employee has a clear view of real paying customers and what they need, while in large enterprises almost nobody does. The surface area has become far too small relative to the company's volume.
AND logic: Back when I was studying electric fish I learned to wire together simple electronic circuits. Many included AND gates. Feed nothing but 1s to an AND gate and it outputs a 1. Make any input a 0 and it outputs a 0.
AND logic extends to any number of operands. (A AND B AND C AND D) is only true if A, B, C and D are all true. If any are false, the entire proposition is false.
The executive suite is one big AND gate. In order to proceed on an idea suggested by an employee, the employee's manager, the employee's manager's manager, and the CEO, CFO, COO, and CAO all have to say yes. If any say no, the entire corporation has said no.
Big companies become risk-averse, not because their individual executives are excessively timid, but because of AND logic.
Sympathetic vibrations: Pluck a string on a guitar. It vibrates. Place the guitar near another identically tuned guitar and the same string on the other guitar will vibrate, too.
It's called a sympathetic vibration.
In business, sympathetic vibrations are why bad ideas can take on lives of their own. It works like this:
A superficially attractive idea (move our factories to China, perhaps) creates good vibes. An executive with vision but no attention to detail picks up on it and repeats it, making it louder -- and therefore better-able to induce sympathetic vibrations in yet more executives. Soon, everyone repeats the idea, and it sounds just like an informed consensus.
But really, it's just one boneheaded idea that, through the physics of sympathetic vibration, ends up filling the company.
Don't agree? How else do you explain it?
Have a subject you'd like me to cover in KJR or Advice Line? Drop me a line and let me know. What - you think I have all the good ideas myself?
Bob Lewis is president of IT Catalysts, Inc. ( www.itcatalysts.com ) an independent consultancy specializing in IT effectiveness and strategic alignment. Contact him at rdlewis@issurvivor.com.
Don't leave me sitting here in a vacuum!
If you think I'm full of beans, let me know. The address is Letters@ISSurvivor.com. Or, if you need advice, ask for it at Advice@ISSurvivor.com.
I sometimes use reader letters in my columns. The rules:
In your letter, let me know if and how I can use it (as is, sanitized, or don't be ridiculous - you'll be found out and run out of town).
Also let me know if you'd prefer to remain completely anonymous, or whether I may give you credit by name
All letters and responses are the property of IS Survivor Publishing, division of IT Catalysts, Inc.
Copyright 2006, IS Survivor Publishing, all rights reserved.
If you like this article, why not let a friend enjoy it, too? It's fine with me, and in fact I'd be flattered. All I ask is that you send the whole thing, including this notice. But don't be shy ... if you think they'd like it, don't you think they should see it? But only those people - you wouldn't want me to get a reputation as a spammer, would you?
To Subscribe, visit http://www.issurvivor.com/registerKJR.asp
ManagementSpeak: Sounds great. Can you e-mail me the details?
Translation: I must remember to add you to my spam filter's blacklist.
KJR Club member Nicky Avery e-mailed me the translation.
Adios, Cingular.
So far as I can tell, AT&T just repurchased itself from itself for a lot of money. I'm sure that can't really be the case, though.
I just can't handle the math.
Math can be useful. It can help us understand when circumstances we don't like are built into the fabric of the space-time continuum. That's particularly handy for companies that have a blame-oriented culture and are wondering whose fault it is.
For example:
Combinatorials: I've mentioned the formula n(n-1)/2 before. You can use it to calculate the number of pairs of objects in any collection. It explains why an entrepreneurial startup venture can operate as a "band of brothers." Until, that is, it succeeds.
Imagine the startup consists of five old friends who know and trust each other. n(n-1)/2 means it contains 10 pairs of people. With only ten pairs, everyone can maintain trust; everyone knows what everyone else is good at, and the company operates smoothly.
So the company succeeds. Pretty soon it has 100 employees -- 4,950 pairs. There's simply no way every pair will exhibit mutual trust. Some pairs are total strangers; others consist of people who just plain don't like each other; who see each other as rivals; or otherwise can't work together effectively.
Surface area to volume ratio: Blow up a balloon -- for simplicity, imagine it's spherical. When it's an inch in radius, its rubber surface covers 12.566 square inches (4*pi*radius^2) and encloses a volume of 4.189 cubic inches (4/3*pi*radius^3). Surface Area/Volume = 3.
Blow up the balloon to a five inch radius. It now has a surface area of 314.159 square inches, and encloses 523.598 cubic inches. Surface Area/Volume = 0.6.
Small balloons have a lot of surface area for each unit of volume. Big ones have very little. It's why we're made out of many itty bitty cells instead of being big globs of protoplasm. The quantities of oxygen and nutrients cells need (and wastes they must dispose of) depends on how much stuff they contain -- their volume. Their surface area limits how fast they can exchange it all with the outside world.
If this still doesn't make sense, compare the five-inch balloon to 125 one-inch balloons. Both enclose about 524 cubic inches. The five-inch balloon contains it in 314 square inches of rubber. The 125 one-inch balloons need about 1,570 square inches -- five times the surface area.
It is because small objects have a much higher surface-area-to-volume ratio that iron dust is highly flammable while iron bars are not (nor do a prison make, not that it's relevant).
It also explains why it is that in small entrepreneurships, every employee has a clear view of real paying customers and what they need, while in large enterprises almost nobody does. The surface area has become far too small relative to the company's volume.
AND logic: Back when I was studying electric fish I learned to wire together simple electronic circuits. Many included AND gates. Feed nothing but 1s to an AND gate and it outputs a 1. Make any input a 0 and it outputs a 0.
AND logic extends to any number of operands. (A AND B AND C AND D) is only true if A, B, C and D are all true. If any are false, the entire proposition is false.
The executive suite is one big AND gate. In order to proceed on an idea suggested by an employee, the employee's manager, the employee's manager's manager, and the CEO, CFO, COO, and CAO all have to say yes. If any say no, the entire corporation has said no.
Big companies become risk-averse, not because their individual executives are excessively timid, but because of AND logic.
Sympathetic vibrations: Pluck a string on a guitar. It vibrates. Place the guitar near another identically tuned guitar and the same string on the other guitar will vibrate, too.
It's called a sympathetic vibration.
In business, sympathetic vibrations are why bad ideas can take on lives of their own. It works like this:
A superficially attractive idea (move our factories to China, perhaps) creates good vibes. An executive with vision but no attention to detail picks up on it and repeats it, making it louder -- and therefore better-able to induce sympathetic vibrations in yet more executives. Soon, everyone repeats the idea, and it sounds just like an informed consensus.
But really, it's just one boneheaded idea that, through the physics of sympathetic vibration, ends up filling the company.
Don't agree? How else do you explain it?
Have a subject you'd like me to cover in KJR or Advice Line? Drop me a line and let me know. What - you think I have all the good ideas myself?
Bob Lewis is president of IT Catalysts, Inc. ( www.itcatalysts.com ) an independent consultancy specializing in IT effectiveness and strategic alignment. Contact him at rdlewis@issurvivor.com.
Don't leave me sitting here in a vacuum!
If you think I'm full of beans, let me know. The address is Letters@ISSurvivor.com. Or, if you need advice, ask for it at Advice@ISSurvivor.com.
I sometimes use reader letters in my columns. The rules:
Copyright 2006, IS Survivor Publishing, all rights reserved.
If you like this article, why not let a friend enjoy it, too? It's fine with me, and in fact I'd be flattered. All I ask is that you send the whole thing, including this notice. But don't be shy ... if you think they'd like it, don't you think they should see it? But only those people - you wouldn't want me to get a reputation as a spammer, would you?
To Subscribe, visit http://www.issurvivor.com/registerKJR.asp
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