Rob Lefferts, good friend and Group Program Manager for Microsoft Sharepoint, offered me a gem of advice recently. If there is a list of laws for being a good team manager, this would be near the top of my list:

The Lefferts law of management: It is your fault.

There are a dozen reasonable excuses in any situation for why things are not going well: don’t use them.

If you need more help, it’s your job to ask for it. If someone let you down, it’s your job to plan better next time or find a way to recover. If you are the bottleneck, it’s your fault for not delegating more. Whatever the thing is that isn’t going well, you are the primary person to do something about it. If you’re not sure what to do, it’s your job to ask others for advice. If you have the title ‘manager’ in your name, step up. Practice the habit of absorbing blame for what is going on, while distributing the rewards. When all else fails, be the fall guy. If people see you take enough bullets for them, soon they’ll be taking some for you.

The net effect on even a small team can change the balance of morale. Being passionately accountable for the project creates a shield for others and makes it safer for them to invest more personal responsibility in their work. When they do, the state of the work can only get better.

When in doubt, good managers assume something important is their fault and do something about it.

Posted in Management | 8 Comments »

This is exactly the kind of topic I avoid here, but since the deal hasn’t been shot dead (at least not yet) as I’d expected, it’s time to throw an opinion on the pile.

The first thing that comes to mind is the 1995 attempt by Microsoft to buy Intuit. It doesn’t seem important now but at the time it was a huge deal: it would have been the largest software acquisition in history. Inside Microsoft, where I worked at the time, the move was a surprise, much like the Yahoo deal probably was (Hot/Big companies are news leaks, so execs rarely bother with early internal memos). The DOJ said no, but regardless it represented the same type of inspired, ballsy, ‘go all in’ strategy that people forget Microsoft is known for (See Microsoft reverses course or Internet Tidal Wave Memo).

Forget whether it will work or not, this Yahoo move communicates how competitive and aggressive Microsoft still is. If Google kicks Microsoft’s ass all over the next decade, it will be a bloody war all the way. Unlike IBM, Microsoft is not going to walk quietly to the sidelines of public attention; they’re going to go out swinging. So say what you will about the strategy, but in terms of moving to take control over the battleground, Microsoft has scored a victory: they’re in the headlines, for the first time in ages, for being on the prowl, while news of Google has fallen beneath the fold. With the paint still wet on their recent acquisition of DoubleClick, it’s hard for Google to complain loudly right now.

Ok, here’s the cynicism. All mergers suck. They really do. They rarely go well and when they do it’s only after 12-16 months of hand wringing and confusion among everyone involved on both sides (not to mention the costs of defections on principle). No sane person would ever choose to merge with another company that has overlapping product lines. It’s a move that is only conceivable from the landscape view provided by executive ivory towers. VPs can say all they want about not losing jobs, but everyone knows no VP would ever say “Yes. This merger means you will be fired 3 weeks from now! Run for the hills!” It just doesn’t go that way, ever. Being employed isn’t much of a prize anyway if the job that remains barely resembles the one you loved. Of course if you hate your job, or your project, then this could be opportunity time.

But on the whole I suspect the entire Windows Live division held in a collective cry of despair the day the merger was announced, in the same way the Microsoft Money team did in 1995. It’s hard to recover from that feeling of betrayal that comes from working hard for months, loyally following your leader’s commands, only to learn, as an aside, over coffee, that someone 5 levels above you had been scheming to buy a competitor, one of the targets on your well worn dartboard, all along. In the old Microsoft days it was the stock options that carried you through. The hallway talk was “We do what’s right for the company first” but I don’t know if that line is still heard, much less believed, anymore. In some ways merger talk is a reality test: is what I’ve made better than what we’re buying? And will the newly appointed mystery date VP agree? That kind of uncertainty can’t help but tank morale.

And now, optimism. As an orchestrator, an architect, a creator, this would be one of the greatest shopping sprees for intellectual property of the last 20 years. It will be a once in a lifetime treat to be the VP who gets to pick and choose among projects and people from two vast pools of ideas grown from very different gardens. Hand that task over to a Ray Ozzie, Chris Jones or Joe Belfiore, and, if you get everyone else sufficiently far out of their way, wondrous things are possible. I’d bet any of them, or perhaps a management star from Yahoo’s ranks, could inspire the best people from both companies to stick around, at least long enough to watch the first offspring rise above the merger mess, or, perhaps, go up in flames.

Posted in Management, Microsoft | 1 Comment »

The recent Wired article on Apple’s management practices is interesting for the wrong reasons. The article makes several points about the irony of Apple’s popularity in the tech-world given the secrecy, an old world concept in the new open web 2.0 world, with which they work.

This is fine and good, but the big question I had while reading the piece is this: if Apple is so secretive, how can the reporter have any confidence that their sources are any good? Or that the people willing to talk to the reporter don’t have their own reasons for telling less than flattering stories about Steve Jobs? The article says:

Apple creates must-have products the old-fashioned way: by locking the doors and sweating and bleeding until something emerges perfectly formed. It’s hard to see the Mac OS and the iPhone coming out of the same design-by-committee process that produced Microsoft Vista or Dell’s Pocket DJ music player

The old fashioned way? Hard to think of many old fashioned companies making perfect products. And while it’s hard to see the iphone coming out of the same process at Microsoft and Dell, I’m sure there were plenty of design review meetings, executive reviews, and other meetings at Apple that are similar in purpose to what goes on at Microsoft or Dell. Like Google’s 20% time, culture is the overlooked factor in why outcomes are what they are. The same process can arrive at very different outcomes if the cultural values and rewards are different.

Believe me, I’m no Apple flunky defending the mothership - but the article creates it’s own lack of credibility in making judgments about a place described by the writer as very difficult to access, and because it’s a magazine article there’s no burden of referencing sources, or even calling on other Wired writers for context in how product decisions at Apple are made.

Moreso, the article misses the fundamental point: Apple loves its products, and people love its products. If there is any ideal Jobs represents it’s clearly the attempt to make great things, an ideal rare among tech companies, much less ones in the Fortune 500. And with product quality so high consumers are indifferent to whatever management philosophy is behind it.

The best analogy for the description of Apple offered in this piece is the film industry. Where directors and producers drive creative visions, large numbers of experts work hard in service to those ideas, and the entire endeavor is organized with premiums on secrecy and control. It’s just an artistic model for business, not something unique to Apple or that odd for folks who study how great things are made.

Posted in Management, creative thinking | 8 Comments »

Found this list in an old notebook - I have no idea what exactly prompted the list. Guess I was feeling ignored at work :) Instead of blaming others, I took a shot at self-criticism, and assumed the problem was mine. What could it be?

Why you are being ignored (The rude Q&A style list):

- You are not talking
- You are not saying anything they care about
- You aren’t convincing them why they should care
- You don’t share your passion
- You talk too much
- You sound stupid
- You are stupid
- You waste time and never get straight to the point
- You pick too many battles and have never won any of them
- No one has a reason to trust you
- You smell funny
- You have no power
- You have not earned anyone’s respect
- You always ignore everyone else

I’m sure you know someone who has potential, but always gets ignored - what else should be added to the list?

Posted in Management | 13 Comments »

Andrew Stellman and Jennifer Greene, authors of Head first PMP and Head first C++, are working on a new book called Beautiful Teams.

The goal for the book is to capture great stories about software development teams in a book, using a format similar to the bestseller Beautiful code. I think it’s a great idea and if all goes well I’ll be contributing a chapter.

If you think you can write about a true story from your experience in the tech-sector, that includes something about the team, and the relationships between people involved and how that helped or hurt the project, contact Stellman & Greene here.

Posted in Management, Software/Web development | No Comments »

From all my travels and speaking gigs in 2007, I’m most confident about the following advice: Stop using the word innovation in 2008. Just stop. Right now. Commit to never saying the word again. Einstein, Ford, Leonardo da Vinci, Picasso, and Edison rarely said the word and neither should you. Every crowd I’ve said this to laughed and agreed. The I-word is killing us.

Here’s why: it doesn’t mean anything anymore. Or more specifically, it means many different things. Unless you are taking the time to make sure everyone is using the word the same way, good communication about ideas and creativity is unlikely to happen.

Four tips:

1. Ask people who use the word what they mean. This is easy. If ever anyone says the word in a meeting, ask “Can you give an example of what you mean by innovative?” If they can’t, you’ve just saved the room a ton of time. Often they don’t know: they’re using the i-word as a cop-out for clear thinking.
2. Use better words instead. Often people mean one of 1) we want new ideas 2) we want better ideas, 3) we want big changes 4) we need to place big bets on new ideas. Great. Any of those short phrases are more powerful and specific than the i-word. Use them instead.
3. Ban the i-word from e-mails and internal documents. It’s one thing for marketers to use innovation in press releases. It’s another to let that word cloud up how people making things think about what they’re making. Force your team to be precise and give up the crutch of the innovation word. Reward people who use the word sparingly and find better ways to communicate.
4. Just be good. That’s hard enough. Most things made in the world suck. They really do. If you work somewhere that struggles to make a half-decent product, with the morale of a prison, why are you talking about innovation? You have to get the training wheels off before entering the Daytona 500. If you can making something good, that solves real problems, works reliably, is affordable, and is built by a happy, motivated and well rewarded staff, you’ll kick your competitor’s asses. Focus on solving those real problems. If you succeed on those innovation, in all its forms, will likely take care of itself.

At lunch 2.0 I talked more about abuse of the word and alternative definitions. Video and podcast.

Posted in Innovation, Management | 13 Comments »

I get lots of questions and suggestions for things to write about during the week. And while the forums are locked, I’ll answer here instead:

Kishore asks: when too many ideas are created in a company, have you seen a efficient (and web 2.0) way for colleagues (every knowledge worker) to rank each other’s ideas ? and select the top and implement? (See collatodo)

This is never the big problem. There are a zillion ways to track ideas and they’ve been around for a long time (A whiteboard, a spreadsheet, a wiki, any database, etc.). The lack of a tool for this is not the reason why a team isn’t creative, or isn’t making good products. It’s that the people with power are not putting them into action.

Sure, some tools are better than others, but it’s like having grocery lists: having a tool for families to vote on things to buy is one thing, but someone actually going to the store and laying down cash to buy them is another.

The problem in most organizations isn’t a shortage of ideas, it’s that few ideas are given a chance to grow before they’re killed. If you want an organization to be more creative, the people in power need to decide to fund, develop, and ship those ideas out to people. And if people don’t know how that happens currently, then the first step is for leaders to make the existing process visible to everyone.

Here’s another good one:

JR asks: I’m working in a tech company as a Project Manager and would like to change my career slowly in the direction of an innovation enabler. Where shall I start? (It can be an URL you give me ;)

First step: stop using the word innovation. It’s a buzzword, it’s jargon, and most creative people’s eyes will glaze over when you use it. Instead, use words like: positive change, better decisions, and making co-workers more effective and creative. Those 3 things are tangible and co-workers will have a clue as to what you’re talking about.

As far as enabling, here’s 3 quick tips:

1. Identify one specific challenge or unmet need your customers have. It’s easiest to anchor creativity around customers, since that’s who you’re making things for. Collaborate with your team to create this list, or pick something from an existing list. Start small, pick one problem, and rally your team around it.
2. Brainstorm ways to change your product to satisfy that need. Keep the group of people involved small, make it fun, and do it in an afternoon.
3. Make quick/cheap prototypes. Do some experiments: try out some of the ideas for #2. Make it fun. Give programmers an afternoon to play with ideas (buy them lunch, and protect this play time). If few are interested, pick the few and focus on them. After a few sessions pick your most interesting experiment, and refine into something you can pitch to decision makers.

As the PM, you’re a great person to be leading the process of identifying problems, generating ideas, and prototyping solutions. If you do this once for a small thing, and it ships, you’ll have earned the trust from your team to repeat it, possibly on larger ideas.

Have a question you want me to answer? Leave a comment below or contact me.

Posted in Management, ask berkun, creative thinking | 2 Comments »

It’s rare to find a short, well written paper than nails a subject popular books get wrong. If you agree, and care about breakthroughs and managing innovation, especially on software projects, this is the paper for you.

It’s called Managing for breakthroughs in productivity, by Allan L. Scherr (PDF).

The article comes from his experience as a manager of various projects at IBM and focuses on the patterns that make breakthroughs possible. What was most striking for me is how little jargon and theory he requires to make his points.

He identifies:

• Breakdowns. Often something has to go wrong for the opportunity for breakthroughs to happen. It’s at the moment where a project faces a challenge, whether by design or by circumstance, that the opportunity for a breakthrough surfaces. How a manager responds to a breakdown creates, or denies, a potential breakthrough (Do I blame people all day, or use it to create an opportunity?)
• Assertion vs. Declaration . He identifies the difference between work a programmer can prove they can do (Assertion), vs. what they believe they can do (Declaration). For breakthroughs to occur, people must be given a chance to do work than can not be proven: ambition and risk are necessary for breakthroughs. If individuals are not trusted to take risks, breakthroughs are unlikely.
• Team commitment . He identifies that failure on one part of a breakthrough project must be aided by other people on the project. A group where everyone only cares about their own component is unlikely to make a breakthrough, as the high risk guarantees some component of the project will fall behind and how the rest of the team responds (support, aid, advice, blame?) decides the fate of the entire project.

It might be the best 15 pages I’ve read on managing breakthrough projects in a year, much better than most of the books and other commonly referenced sources. The first 3 pages are dry but I promise it gets better.

Managing for breakthroughs in productivity, by Allan L. Scherr (PDF). (Hat tip to Gregg Gordon @ SSRN).

Posted in Innovation, Management | 5 Comments »

I’m volunteering to go to the front lines in Todd Wilken’s war against blackberries in meetings. Lifehacker and the NYTimes have taken on similar issues before, and I’m all for it. Here’s why.

Any real meeting, where decisions are being made (e.g. not a status meeting) should require people’s full attention. If people are voluntarily comfortable half reading e-mail and half-listening, it’s an indicator to me that:

• There are too many people in the room.
• Few decisions are being made.
• I’m failing to facilitate the discussion to keep it on target.
• The information being conveyed is low priority.
• I’m wasting f2f time with information I could deliver in other ways.

If I allow this to go on, I encourage passive attention in meetings, further allowing stupid people to prattle on about low priority things, which further encourages more people to tune out. As as Steven M. Smith points out, the blackberry use is a symptom of bad meetings, not the cause. The person running the meeting is the place to point the finger (who is responsible for answering the question is this type of meeting right for the agenda we have?).

Instead, I believe in making attendance at meetings binary. Either you are in, or you are out. If the meeting is too boring to keep your attention, then it’s a good sign to both of us that you do not need to be in the room - so get up and leave. Most meetings should be optional anyway: you don’t have to come, but don’t cry if we decide something you wanted to have input on.

Moreso, 95% of the time what people claim to be urgent status is stuff that can wait. Call bullshit on people. Unless they’re heart surgeons, or front line web people, the world can wait 20 or 30 minutes for the meeting to end for them to get to whatever it is. The web will wait. IM will wait. It can all wait for you if you have your shit together. This is doubly true for leads and managers: if they’re managing their teams well, they should have subordinates who can be effective for a few hours without their hands being held. Most managers should be embarrassed, not proud, to be in hyper-crackberry panic mode all the time.

However, if we’re talking status meetings, where 15 or 20 people are all crammed into a room, that’s another story. These are often a waste of time, but if you must have them, the arguments for passive attention have more weight.

I like Todd’s list of recommendations - worth a look.

Posted in Management, Software/Web development, art of project management | 7 Comments »

I hate most systems of innovation I see or read about, as they fail to directly attack most of core challenges innovators face. But one idea I’m found of is the idea approval index. Here’s how it works:

How many approvals do you need to release something to a customer?

Think it through. It’s probably more than you think. Include informal or implicit approvals. Even if you’re the CEO, can you code the idea yourself? Design it? There are always people to convince or cajole.

The higher the number, the harder innovation is. The lower the number, the easier. It’s that simple. For example:

A) Joe Blogger has an idea for a way to radically improve his wordpress blog. He stays up late and codes it up. The next morning he posts it on his website. Idea Approval Index = 1. It’s just him - he thinks it, makes it, ships it.

B Fred is the engineering lead at Bozotech. He stays up late and codes it up. He shows it to another engineering lead for some feedback. They review it with the Quality assurance manager, who requests some changes, and get their designer to clean up their UI. Finally they show it to the group manager who loves it, and asks them to present it at the next feature review meeting (4 other team leads). Finally, days later, the web team agrees to get it online. Idea Approval Index (IAI) = 10 .

Counting approvals is a rough guide - it tells you how many chances there are for an idea to get killed before it makes it out the door.

Are there problems with this metric? Sure (Feel free to play devil’s advocate in the comments). But as a rough guide it’s handy. If you want more innovation and change, you want to lower the approval index. If you want more predictability and stability, raise the index. If you want both at the same time, on the same project, you’ve got a tougher problem - I’ve got answers: leave a comment if you care and I’ll post a follow-up.

It’s no surprise that the risk taking required to develop a new idea most often happens in small groups or by people working solo - their approval index is low.

Posted in Innovation, Management, creative thinking | 9 Comments »

Wired magazine recently held a contest to see who had the most pathetic looking cubicle workspace. The winner, photo at right, works in the IT department and the University of Alabama, behind a rack of file cabinets.

Check out the other winners, with photos, on the bottom right of the page.

(From metafilter)

Posted in Management, humor | 1 Comment »

This is a question I’ve thought about often (See Google’s ten rules compared to Microsoft). Before I give my answer, if you’re in Seattle you should go listen to Lawrence Lessig give his talk on the subject Friday Nov 2nd at Kane Hall, at the University of Washington.

The short answer is No. In 1998 Microsoft was suffering from the shaky Windows 98 release, was facing a new DOJ lawsuit, and will still engaged in the browser-war with Netscape. I was in my 4th year at MSFT in ‘98, and it was the roughest year for the company I’d seen. The browser war was emotionally brutal, and on the Internet Explorer team we were trying to recover from IE4 (a release few of us were proud of). To outsiders, 1998 was a year of comeuppance for Microsoft.

Looking to next year I don’t see Google headed for seas quite so rocky. Yes, there are threats of major lawsuits with YouTube and search privacy, but those threaten future revenue sources more than current ones. However, like Microsoft in the 90s, the competitive landscape isn’t impressive. Yahoo and Microsoft have are still trailing players in tech-sector mind share.

Most important comparison: By 1998 Microsoft, the 23 year old company, had managed to piss off just about everyone at least once: at least it felt that way when I spoke at conferences. Google, only 8 years old, has a much higher standing in the industry, among competitors and partners, than Microsoft did. But then again, it’s 15 years younger :)

On culture and attitude: Life inside Google feels much like at Microsoft in the mid 1990s. I’ve been to Google several times (Chapter 1 of the Myths of Innovation recounts one visit) and know folks working there. The vibe feels incredibly familiar to my mid-90s MSFT memories: happy, smart, independent people who feel they are empowered to change the world, and who work in a special place, with special rules. And as best I can tell, it’s true. They deserve to feel that way. So in that respect, rock-on Googlers.

But the rub is that in the mid-1990s Microsofties felt the same way about their place in the industry, and their ability to change the world, as the folks at Google seem to today: We have the ball and we are running away with it. I suspect the folks at Atari in 1977 (year of the 2600), Apple in 1985 (and perhaps again now), Netscape in 1994 (year of Mosaic) and dozens of other companies that were once at the top of the world. And they were all prone to the same kinds of self-destructive hubris.

Common mistakes employees of dominant companies make:

1. Believing no one has been at the center of the tech-universe before.
2. Inability to take a non self-centric view of the world.
3. Depending on power and intimidation, more than intelligence and wisdom.
4. Failing to find ways to stay humble & hungry while being dominant.
5. Focusing more on beating rivals than satisfying customers.
6. Underestimating how decisions will be received by the rest of the world.

When I was at Microsoft (’94-’03), I always felt the company made things so much harder for itself in how employees, executives included, presented themselves to the world. I can’t tell you how many times I saw Microsoft employees embarrassing themselves at conferences, e-mail lists or on newsgroups. And it wasn’t entirely their fault: they were expressing the internal culture to the outside world and the result was predictably disastrous.

The perception of Google today, and in 2008, is at a tipping point. They are quickly rounding out their positions of dominance and the Microsoft comparisons will only get sharper. If they can learn the best lessons from Microsoft’s 1998, it’s about handling pressure with grace, and the wisdom to pay more than token attention to the mistakes above.

Posted in Innovation, Management, Myths of Innovation | 6 Comments »