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.