Strategy: Windows Phone 7

The good news is Microsoft's new phone platform doesn't suck.  Being a believer that more market competition benefits me as a consumer, this makes me happy.

Microsoft offers deep integration with its other offerings:

The integration with Microsoft services appears top-notch, ranging from OneNote in the cloud to Zune for media, Xbox Live for gaming and Bing for navigation and search.

I think this is 100% the right strategy; at the same time, I'm not convinced it will be successful.  Apple did very well by simply integrating iTunes with its iPod, and grew that into the phone business.  Apple's platform continues to be the easiest and best music experience, to the extent that they might be able to leverage that further into the social space with Ping.  Microsoft has a richer stable of apps that people rely on, and building in and on them gives them the greatest chance for competitive advantage.

But the size of Microsoft -- the innumerable products they have -- will make getting integration right difficult.  Even integration between Excel and Word, which have been around forever and have hardly changed recently, is clunky and superficial.  Integration into Sharepoint was another opportunity to dazzle us with unimaginable convenient and features, and instead every time I use Sharepoint, it feels like a distraction, something I need to get around.


Another confounding aspect: which integrations carry the biggest upside?  Is Zune really a partner you want to be tied to?  Is OneNote so compelling that integrating with it brings value?  Do you even know anyone using either?

Despite these concerns, Microsoft has to travel this path.  Otherwise, they're just another company (yes, with a lot of money, but that didn't help Kin, Zune, or their other failed new products), and definitely not the nimblest or most risk-taking -- two required features of successful new ventures.

Motivation: would your employees buy their own supplies?

This came from a local paper, but surely many teachers around the country behave similarly:

Like many colleagues, she said she spent about $100 on back-to-school supplies. She said she expected to spend another $400 of her own money over the rest of the school year.

Let's put it another way: suppose $500 is 1% of the teacher's annual wages, which seems like a fairly reasonable estimate.  They're spending money not for the employer, but for what you would call "clients", who should and are expected to provide for themselves. 

Now take a typical bond trader, and 1% of their salary is $5k to $10k.  (Yes, it could be a lot more.)  Would you think they would spend that much every year on client problems?  They might ask their company to pay, but if they didn't, how many do you think would dig into their own pockets?

The article goes on to say that many of these teachers have spouses that have lost their jobs due to the recession.  They spend the money anyway because they want to make sure every child has equal opportunity, and they want to provide a good environment.

How do you get an employee to care so much about their job that they take the quality of their work so personally?

Sure, it helps that teaching can be very rewarding.  Teaching can provide a meaningful purpose, which Dan Pink identifies as one of the three critical factors for employee motivation.

Another aspect is professional pride.  Teachers have a vision of how they want the lesson plan they've created to go, and every kid that doesn't have the right supplies is an obstacle to achieving that.  I know a number of software developers who pay for many pieces of software and hardware so that they can do their jobs better.  In both cases, autonomy about how to achieve their goals -- the teachers create their own lesson plans, the programmers can use their own tools -- imparts ownership of the results.  Yes, this covers both of the other primary inputs that Dan Pink discusses.

One personal aspect, though, is simply getting employees deeply involved with their customers.  Teachers see theirs everyday, and the desire to help springs forth.  (Or else, they become overwhelmed by it, shut down, and just see it as another job, the kids' problems as not part of their job description.)

Being around other people, personally sharing in their problems, unlocks a natural instinct to want to get involved.  We sometimes purposefully avoid knowing anything because we know beforehand that once we even put a toe in the water, we'll be compelled to jump all the way in.

If you're running software teams, get them in front of the users as much as possible, as much as the users allow.  That's one strong argument against separate support and development teams.  Programmers who see their users more won't need any more motivation than that to rush back and work quickly on that bug that seems so small (hey, there are workarounds!) but is in fact a major pain and awfully embarrassing.

Drive: reading list

At the end of Drive, Dan Pink offers a dozen or so books that provide more depth.  All of them intrigued, but these stood out:

Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation by Edward Deci.
"The questions so many people ask -- namely, 'How do I motivate people to learn?  to work?  to do their chores?  or to take their medicine?' -- are the wrong questions.  They are wrong because they imply that motivation is something that gets done to people, rather than something that people do." 

Fascinating.  Those are questions I'm asking all the time, so I've got the wrong ones.

Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes by Alfie Kohn.
"Do rewards motivate people?  Absolutely.  They motivate people to get rewards."

I've been thinking about whether to given a small token at every practice for the hardest working player on the soccer team I'm coaching -- basically, a gold star.  Yes, very Management 2.0, but I figure these are 8 year-olds.  Maybe I should read this book first.  Kohn has been writing about this stuff from all sorts of angles; lots to explore.

Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace by Ricardo Semler.  Pink calls Semler "the first autonomy freak."  He has 3000 workers in a manufacturing company, Semco -- the kind of company where you'd think stricter management would produce the best results -- and he lets them set their own hours, vote on major decisions.  Some set their own salaries.  Semler hesitates to call his company "organized" -- 3000 people! 

The company has done fantastically well for 20 years.

Drive: audit yourself

Drive offers a tool for measuring autonomy, one of the three tenets of Management 3.0.  Audit your workplace or your team. How much input do you or your team members have over:

• Tasks -- responsibilities and main tasks.  Can they decide what they work on, what goals they want to set, what their priorities are?

• Time -- work schedule.  Who decides when the "work day" starts and ends?  If there's rotational coverage of some kind, who determined what rotation was required and how was the coverage assigned?  Do you require people to spend time commuting?

• Team -- who they partner and interact with.  Do they get to pick their project team members or are people assigned?  Can they decide to divide the work up with others any way they choose?  How much freedom do they have to interact with customers or business partners, or senior managers for that matter?

• Tools -- how they're supposed to do it.  Tasks are what they're supposed to do; tools are the method.  For programmers, it could include architectures, IDEs, even languages: who chooses?  Are there a lot strict processes in place -- check in these things, fill out this form, then get sign-offs from these people, then schedule your release only on Fridays -- or is it totally free?

Compile the ratings given by everyone on your team or department or whatever level you desire. 

Being completely autonomous in every aspect of the job might be undesirable.  For example, jobs that require customer interaction have to consider the customers' hours and locations.  You'll have to get creative to find ways to bring more autonomy to that area of the.

Also, average scores might be fine, but a low score in one area might indicate an place to focus.

*Bounce*

Matthew Syed's Bounce tries to uncover how exceptional people got that way.  It starts out promising, but quickly fizzles out.

It offers a very tight review of current studies that demonstrate that hard work matters more than talent.  You can skip Talent Is Overrated and just read the first couple chapters of Bounce.

But the hard work argument just opens another mystery: what compels people to work so hard that they rise above everyone else, even at great cost and pain to themselves?  The book never provides a meaningful answer.  A few studies show that the right kind of coaching words can make a difference, but that just scratches the surface.  I doubt Michael Jordan was lucky enough to only have positive, supportive coaches all his youth and career.

The rest of the book talks about other high performance issues, such as "choking" and how to avoid it.  Not uninteresting, but more like appendix material to the main storyline, which remains unresolved.

*Drive*, part 1

Drive tells us about Motivation 3.0.  Version 1.0 involved kings: do it my way or die.  Motivation 2.0 introduced management: supervision and evolved forms of control.

Management still revolves largely around supervision, "if-then" rewards, and other forms of control.  That's true even of the kinder, gentler Motivation 2.1 approach that whispers sweetly about things like "empowerment" and "flexibility."

Indeed, just consider the very notion of "empowerment."  It presumes that the organization has the power and benevolently ladles some of it into the waiting bowls of grateful employees.  But that's not autonomy.  That's just a slightly more civilized form of control.  Or take management's embrace of "flex time."  Ressler and Thompson call it a "con game," and they're right.  Flexibility simply widens the fences and occasionally opens the gates.  It, too, is little more than control in sheep's clothing.  The words themselves reflect presumptions that run against both the texture of the times and the nature of the human condition.  In short, management isn't the solution; it's the problem.

If you don't have management, what's left? 

Motivation 3.0, which comes from the self.  Drive is about how organizations can foster that -- indeed, that organizations must foster that, because those that don't will themselves die in the future.

Tradeoffs: org design

Are all org designs evil?  This blog post does a great job of explaining the very serious trade-offs:

The first rule of organizational design is that all organizational designs are bad. With any design, you will optimize communication among some parts of the organization at the expense of other parts. For example, if you put product management in the engineering organization, you will optimize communication between product management and engineering at the expense of communication between product management and marketing. As a result, as soon as you roll out the new organization, people will find fault with it and they will be right. Still, at some point, the monolithic design of one huge organization runs out of gas and you will need to split things into smaller sub-groups...

Your goal is to choose the least of all evils. Think of the organizational design as the communications architecture for your company. If you want people to communicate, the best way to accomplish that is to make them report to the same manager. By contrast, the further away people are in the organizational chart, the less they will communicate. The organizational design is also the architecture for how the company communicates with the outside world. For example, you might want to organize your sales force by product to maximize communication with the relevant product groups and maximize the product competency of the sales force. If you do that, then you will do so at the expense of simplicity for customers who buy multiple products and will now have to deal with multiple sales people.

Destructive behavior is the new normal

According to Drive, the definition of Type A personality came out of a health study.  You were supposed to avoid acting like a Type A to avoid heart attack, hyper tension and other stress-related diseases.  In other words, you were supposed to strive to be a Type B simply as a matter of health, to live longer.

Nowadays, any pejorative meaning associated with being Type A seems to have disappeared.  If anything, it's swung the other way.  Type A's can brush off their behavior with a laugh, "I'm such a Type A, ha ha."  Some schools and businesses brag about how they only hire Type As: hard-charging, never-sleeping, never-satisfied people.  These qualities sometimes pass as requirements for leadership.

Meanwhile, you never hear anyone bragging about being Type B.  It'd most likely be taken as self-deprecation.

Is there a better sign of how things have changed in modern life?

Today, good is bad

In our age of excess, it's harder than ever to stay focused, says Paul Graham in a remarkable essay:

One sense of "normal" is statistically normal: what everyone else does. The other is the sense we mean when we talk about the normal operating range of a piece of machinery: what works best.

These two senses are already quite far apart. Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly.

Emphasis mine, just because I love that sentence.  The point is, you have to practically live like a monk to avoid the multitude of distractions that feel productive but in fact are just sinkholes of time with maybe some, but definitely small, benefits.  

Most of us won't make it (most likely me included).  Unlike the modern day food industry and trying to eat well -- another place where if you're behaving like everyone else, you're doing quite badly -- in this case you can determine exactly the outcome you want for yourself. 

An opportunity for the disciplined.

Is Google braindead about social apps?

Filed under "your strengths are your weaknesses":

why can't Google build social apps? Because Google's core values ("be useful", "do good by users") reject the very notion of lobster traps, bacn and toast, a dozen dimensions of junk food, and giant blue ball machines. Understanding those concepts is not easy. It takes lots of practice, and lots of patience, and lots of learning...

Google is responsible for Orkut, Wave, and Buzz. Ex-Googlers are responsible for Facebook, Foursquare, and Twitter...

Googlers who wanted to develop great social applications had to leave Google to do so... because Google's culture has no respect for successful social applications. YouTube's office is still far from the Google campus to avoid the toxic attitude described by a former Orkut employee, "[Google has] an environment that viewed social networking as a frivolous form of entertainment rather than a real utility, and I'm pretty sure this viewpoint was shared all the way up the chain of command to the founders."...

Google FAILED in acquiring and integrating other social products. Blogger, Picasa, JotSpot, Dodgeball, are dead.

Obviously, this dogma can't be entirely correct, but the line-up of failed apps speaks pretty loudly.  Even their successful apps -- gmail, google phone, google reader, and maybe blogger and picasa -- succeed only in one-to-one interactions, and fail as places to do interactions with multiple people.  They don't resemble social hubs in any way.

But, if as the author says, practice, patience, learning, and failing are key, then Google can definitely turn this around.  They excel at putting new things out and seeing what works.  As long as they don't get driven by the immediate payoff to shareholders in every project, they can continue avoid Microsoft's fate.

Women in technology

Great rumination about why computer science is the only field to suffer declining women participation. Think about that: even if you want to troop out the arguments that skills get rewarded, you need to come up with some explanation why computer science dismally stands alone.

Even the comments, which you always expect to devolve into blathering screeds that eventually result in someone being compared to Hitler, especially on a topic like this, add nuances to the discussion.

I also wonder if there's an east coast difference, or perhaps a financial industry difference. I don't run into a lot of those stereotypical, non-communicative, "don't touch my code" types around me. We still don't have a huge percent of women in IT, but that could be because women are smarter and go work on the trading floor where they make up a significant percentage and the pay is much higher.

The managers I've been around and the hiring I've participated in have actively tried to recruit more women.  Everything being equal, we'll actually hire a woman over a man simply to increase our diversity.  I would go so far as to say that many people I've worked with would pay a bit more to hire women.

But the financial industry, for all its faults, does a relatively good job at institutionalizing the need for diversity.  And New York is diverse like no place on earth.

Two nice reminders about signals of management priorities:

Money is the primary indicator of management priorities...  "We really wanted to give you more to work with, but ..." "Please don't see this as meaning that you aren't important to us..." "This really isn't the year to make our move in your area..."  All these sincerely expressed and well-intentioned comments are designed to help you understand that management is putting resources in somebody else's basket.

Meanwhile:

when you hear your two o'clock appointment say, "I really wanted to meet with you on this today, but ...," you know what is happening.  When you hear a pattern of phrases like that from your management, you are being crowded out of their "work hole" by something they see as more important, or at least more immediate...  When you repeatedly hear, "It's important to me, too, but..," accept that your work is not considered important enough for them to do anything about right now.  Accepting this apparent reality might help you to decide whether you are going to do anything to elevate the importance of your work.

Both from Getting Things Done When You Are Not in Charge.

Neither signal should make you jump to a new job, but they should raise sensitivity for continued signals.

You usually get the first signal at an annual budget discussion.  It's perfectly appropriate to respond with, "What market or business conditions would have to change to justify a higher / full funding?"  Then, if those conditions occur, and you're still not being funded, run for the door; you're stuck in the hamster wheel.

The second one is trickier.  At some point, you probably have to raise the issue on your own.  "Not getting enough face time and attention to my projects is really hindering my ability to move it forward" or "I'm having a hard time convincing the team that the work is important when our meetings with management are constantly canceled."  Sometimes people don't realize the impact of their (in)action, and if you're competent, you're probably good at hiding the deficiencies.  If you have a good manager, she'll want to make sure you're happy and feeling productive, and will respond accordingly.  If not, that's usually sign enough for me that things will not get better.

On fire and slumps

When I left New York for California a week ago I was emerging from one of the most productive development spurts I'd ever had. I didn't know it then but I was about to enter a slump. Since leaving and returning I haven't gotten very much work done at all. I've tried all kinds of tricks to get myself back in gear, but none have worked.

That's Dave Winer.

You frequently hear about a basketball player being red-hot, or a baseball player going into a slump.  How about programmers?

Weird in a way.  After all, it's your brain, just focus it.  Seems pretty simple.

Lately, I've been in a strong productive swing, and feeling great about it.  Part of it is being on a good project.  But I definitely feel it's more than that.  Things just seem to happen.  I sit down to the work and
start drumming out stuff, without even feeling like I'm working.  To some degree, I can't take credit for that.

In the past, I've had some long stretches where every move is a chore.  I had to constantly remind myself to stay focused, purposefully remove all distractions.  Even then, I had to battle the temptations to cut corners (not always successfully).

I didn't realize it, but apparently I was in a slump.

And for the times when things go well, SportsCenter would call that being "en fuego".

The Change Delta

The change delta comes from Getting Things Done When You Are Not in Charge.  I like that delta is the symbol for change, so that makes it easy to remember. 

Any successful attempt at change requires a deep understanding of both what is and what might be.  Interested parties consists of those who want to hinder the process as much as those who want to help. 

At the center is you -- which might be a foreign way of thinking about it. You have a key role to play.  Perhaps the key role.  That's for you to decide.

You might have feet-on-the-ground deep knowledge.  Or, you might be an impartial outside observer.  You frequently hear people use both positions to argue that they can drive the change or help.  Either way, your understanding of these three points is unique.

All this assumes your interest in change lies deeper than merely complaining about the current state of things or dreaming wistfully about possibly futures.

Your problem on one sheet

A3 management process:

A3 is the name for a large sheet of paper (17″ x 11″). With the A3 technique, it is filled up with useful information. Space is intentionally limited to make sure only the most relevant information is shared.

I like the balance between a large sheet and having to fit everything on it.  By the end, it probably does not seem large.  I also suspect that being forced to review the sheet in public with everyone forces other decisions and assumptions out in the daylight; no hidden agendas.

I'd love to see someone use it or at least some real examples.  It'd be difficult to show up to a meeting at my company with one, but then again I once thought doing Agile at all would be impossible at an investment bank.

The real argument against outsourcing

It's clear to me there are only two paths.  One path is to take every repetitive, by-the-book task in your organization and outsource it or mechanize it.  The other path is to take every repetitive, by-the-book task in your organization and give the people who do that task the freedom, the incentive, and yes, the imperative to do something that cannot be outsourced.
Either what you're doing is repetitive, in which case you ought to outsource it, or it's homemade, insightful, and filled with initiative and judgement, in which case you can charge for it.

-- Seth Godin, Meatball Sundae:

Of course, this is only an argument against outsourcing if the organization distributes the power, and everyone runs with it.  Many organizations can't imagine such a scenario and hire people who wouldn't know how to respond.

Middle management is where it's at!

My experience is that the people at the bottom and the top of a typical company are those that feel most restricted in their work.  When the president and the assembly line worker sit down to talk about what they have in common, the demands that others are making on them is likely to come up early.  In a way, the president is the assembly line worker of the larger community the company serves.  However, those of us in the middle have many choices and a great deal of room to test and exercise our powers.

-- Getting Things Done When You Are Not in Charge

The best people

If you ask managers what makes their company special, you'll often hear that they have the best people.  "Our people are what make our company great."  Or, "We only hire the best people so that's all we have here."

You might reasonably dig a little deeper and ask how they know theirs are the best.  Only two of their possible answers make any sense:

1. They have a rigorous screening and hiring process.
2. They pay top dollar for the top talent.

Any other answer is merely hand-waving and not serious. But, really, how effective are even these two reasons?

Most of the companies I've run into that use the" selective hiring" argument didn't seem that selective.  In fact their hiring process ran pretty much like everyone else's: cull through piles of resumes looking for key words, then bring candidates in for interviews with three or for employees.  If everyone's doing it, it can't be special.  This argument really claims that they, the interviewees, are master talent scouts, asking penetrating interview questions, but does that claim have any basis?

That leaves the dollar strategy.  The best-known adherents of this philosophy are... Enron and Wall Street.  Enron is of course out of business.  Wall Street would have been out of business if not for a giant government bailout.

If you're a manager and you give me the "best people" line, I'll seriously wonder how great the company could be.

Unlimited vacation

I've been noodling over this idea of unlimited vacation.  It appeals to my feeling that people should manage themselves. 

And this argument really resonates:

In Freedom, Inc. Gordon Forward of Chaparral Steel talks of the danger of ”managing for the 3%.” In a large enough organization, there might be a couple of people who would take two or three months’ vacation–but if a vacation policy is the only thing holding them back from that, they’re probably “vacationing” at their desks anyway. And so the policy is concealing the problem with that “3%,” not eliminating it.

This relates to the idea that, if you're hiring correctly, then you won't have abuse.  It makes me fear that I might have hired the wrong people.

But just recently I met a guy who actually works at a company where they have unlimited vacation.  He pointed out a critical factor that I completely overlooked: company culture.

In his company, everyone pressures everyone else not to take vacation.  If you ask for a block of 2 weeks off, they'd laugh at you.  You'd have to explain it to a lot of people, because it would keep coming up.  Even a short vacation doesn't go unnoticed.  "Must be nice to have a vacation.  What, not enough to do?"  It's public humiliation.  The company culture doesn't allow for violations. 

My new friend finds that he takes less than 2 weeks off in total every year.

At my company, many people take 2 week blocks off every year.  (In fact, it's a requirement for systems security.)  You get 3 or 4 weeks, and if you don't use it all, you carry it over and have additional time the next year.  It becomes your right to use it.  This seems normal to me, because that's what I've always had.

Would the social pressure work in my company?  On the whole, no way.  It's too big, and it's tough to change the culture.

On the other hand, there's frequently pressure to work long hours.  It usually emerges as joking jabs -- "Wow, you're leaving at 4:50?  I mean, before 5???" -- but underlying it is the general expectation that people work long hours at investment banks.  That starts with the bankers and trickles down.

So, in my group, if we had an unlimited vacation policy, it might very well turn into a vacation deprivation policy. 

In retrospect, it's almost surprising that more companies don't go to unlimited vacation.

The perfect solution for every case

...does not exist.

I have long been an opponent of offices.  Managers sometimes need them for sensitive meetings, but lots of conference rooms solves that problem, and for more people. 

Meanwhile, the local social life of information usually dies at a door divide.  Microsoft is a big proponent of offices, and look where they are.  I say get the managers out into a cube like everyone else. 

But lately, I've been wanting to talk on the phone standing up, because it helps you project your voice and convey energy.  Guess what?  That would bug the crap out of everyone around me, and if I'm facing the wrong way, out of everyone on the floor.  If people see you standing at your cubicle while talking, they will generally assume you're some attention-starved narcissist, which you might be if you actually subjected the floor to your phone calls in a booming voice.

So now I'd like an office, even a shared one.  (I'd also like a stand-up desk while the request line is open.)