Archive for the ‘rant’ Category

An open letter to micromanagers

Dear Micromanager:

Owners of thoroughbreds never stop their horses during a race, every ten seconds, to remind  the horse and jockey how to run, where the finish line is, or that it’d be a good idea to finish first. Why? It would slow them down. Only an idiot would do this.

If you’re a manager, you must assume you have thoroughbreds working for you. Your job is to give them what they need to win their respective races, agreeing with them on the goal  and rewards, but then getting the hell out of the way. Until they start jumping fences or attacking other horses, you have to let them run their race.

Even if you are 30% better at a task than someone who works for you, the time it takes for you to check on them every few hours, and demand approvals over trivial decisions, costs more in lost morale, passion for work, and destruction of self-respect among your staff than the 30% you think you’re adding.  No one works well if they feel they are being treated like an idiot child. Having two people involved in work that should only require one wastes everyone’s time.

Perhaps you don’t think you are managing thoroughbreds and that your horses need lots of help.

This is possible.

But if you are in fact a micromanager, you started over-managing the day you started. You have  no idea of the potential of the people who work for you. Odds are good you’re treating at least one potential  Seabiscuit as if he were a toy pony at the county fair.

A healthy, confident, well-adjusted manager knows their job is to do three things:

  1. Hire thoroughbreds, point them at the finish line,  and get out of their way unless they ask for help
  2. Coach, teach, encourage and position ordinary horses to maximize their potential and approximate thoroughbreds in some of their work.
  3. Fire those who can never do the work needed without your constant involvement to make room for those who can.

If you don’t do these things, the burden of failure is on you. Good managers  achieve all three. Mediocre managers at least are working towards good ends. But bad managers are too distracted by their own egos, paychecks or insecurities to recognize how self-destructive they are.

An easy test of micromanagement is to let your team know you are confident in their ability to do their job and offer, if they wish, that you will be less involved in their day to day work to give them more room to perform. Tell them you are available if they need you, but otherwise you will put some of your attention elsewhere. See what happens. Hold your tongue. Don’t demand to review that email. Don’t insist on regulating who can meet with who. Take one small step backward and see what happens.

Odds are extremely good the world will not end. Your best employees will be happier and more productive, giving you new energy to invest in the rest of your work or more afternoons where you can head home early. Some of your team might surprise you, and thrive with more autonomy. And for those who fail to improve or make mistakes, you’ve lost nothing, as you can step back in where it’s actually needed.

If you are terrified of trying this and have a list of excuses why this is a bad idea, the only thing you are managing is your ego. Perhaps you’re afraid to admit your people can function quite well without your approval or input on every stupid little thing. Or it could be you are proof of the peter principle, and would be happier and more useful if you stopped managing and worked solo. A bigger paycheck is not a healthy trade for making yourself and your staff miserable.

Good managers are brave, and generous with trust in their people. They want them to mature in their judgment and grow in their skills, preferring to err on the side of trusting too much than trusting too little. They take pleasure in letting go and giving power away to their staff, accepting that when someone who works for them shines, they shine too.

But if you do not enjoy these things, and struggle to trust you staff, or can’t bear to see a decision made or reward earned without your name all over it, you should stop managing people.  You and everyone who works for you will be happier if you did.

Hugs and kisses,

Signed,

The people you are micromanaging

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Know someone who needs to read this?

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Calling bullshit on social media

While I like and use Facebook and Twitter, there’s enough hype and abuse of words like innovation, transformation and revolution around all things social media that a critique is warranted – if only to  take a shot at calibrating how people talk about this stuff. I hope this post is used whenever someone feels they’re being sold something phony or that makes little sense and wants a skeptical opinion to help calibrate where the truth is.

For starters: social media is a stupid term. Is there any anti-social media out there? Of course not. All media, by definition, is social in some way. The term interactive media, a more accurate term for what’s going on, lived out its own rise / hype / boom cycle years ago and was smartly ignored this time around – first rule of PR is never re-use a dead buzzword, even if all that you have left are stupid ones. I’ve been involved in many stupid terms, from push-technology to parental-controls, so I should know when I see one.

That said, here’s some points not made often enough:

  1. We have always had social networks. Call them families, tribes, clubs, cliques or even towns, cities and nations.  You could call throwing a party or telling stories by a fire “social media tools”. If anything has happened recently it’s not the birth of social networks, it’s the popularity of digital tools for social networks, which is something different. These tools may improve how we relate to each other, but at best it will improve upon something we as a species have always done. Never forget social networks are old. The best tools will come from people who recognize, and learn from, the rich 10,000+ year history of social networks.
  2. There has always been word of mouth, back-channel, “authentic” media tools. In Gladatorial Rome, in Shakespearean England and in Revolutionary America, motivated individuals had ways to express their ideas and share them. Call it gossip, poems, paintings or pamphlets, there is a long history of individuals taking action to express opinions through non-official channels. The ease of using these channels changes over time, but they always exist because #1 always exists.  Of note, IRC predates some, but certainly not all, of the features twitter is heralded for introducing to the world.
  3. The new media does not necessarily destroy the old. TV was supposed to kill radio – this was wrong. TV forced radio to change and in some ways improve. The web forced TV, newspapers and magazines to change, and they will likely survive forever in some form, focusing on things the web can not do well.  Its unusual for new thing to completely replace the old ones and when they do it takes years. Anyone who claims social media will eliminate standard PR or mass media is engaging in hype, as odds are better those things will change and learn, but never die. It’s wise to ask what each kind of media / marketing is good and bad for and work from there.
  4. Social media consultants writing about social media have inherent biases. It’s difficult to take posts like this about social media seriously, as it’s written by someone from a social media consulting firm without an ounce of humility or perspective. It’s hard to come across as authentic if you promote a revolution that you personally stand to benefit the most from. Much writing about social media is PR people writing about the importance of PR – see a problem of authenticity here? When did PR, like advertisers, become a reliable source for what is authentic? How is SEO optimization, or similiar techniques for twitter, authentic? When a system becomes popular the greedy will game it and social media is no different. We should be worried when people with PR and advertising backgrounds or consulting firms are leading us in the ways of authenticity or integrity. The Twitter Book, from my publisher O’Reilly, takes a surprisingly reasonable, authentic and low-hype approach to social media I wish was more popular.
  5. Signal to Noise is always the problem. I’m someone who would rather read 5 or 10 really good things every day, than skim through 50 or 100 mediocre ones. I find all social media frequently consists of people re-forwarding things they were forwarded that almost none of them appear to have read, as they believe they are rewarded for publishing frequently above all else. Using twitter and digg I often feel I’m in the minority since what’s popular is rarely what’s good.  If you are interested in quality, and not volume, than the size of your network matters less than the value of what’s in it. I’m more fascinated by how kottke.org and metafilter.org have kept such high signal to noise ratios for years than I am about most media tools I see.
  6. All technologies cut both ways and social media will be no different. For all the upsides of any invention there are downsides and it takes time to sort out what they all are. Blogs and Twitter have made self promotion, and self-aggrandizement, acceptable in ways I’ve never seen before, and I’m guilty myself. Is it possible to write or publish without self promotion? I don’t know anymore. I suspect digital tools for social media may have the negative effect of making authentic communication harder, not easier to find, as more people, and corporations, hover right on the gray dividing line between authentic and corporate, or selfish and generous.
  7. Be suspicious of technologies claimed to change the world. The problem with the world is rarely the lack of technologies, the problem is us. Look, we have trouble following brain dead simple concepts like The Golden Rule. Millions starve to death not because we lack the food, but because of greed and lack of political will.  We will largely behave like idiots on blogs and on twitter because we behave that way in real life. Every technological revolution must contend with the fact that we bring our stupidity, selfishness and arrogance along for the ride with our generosity, wisdom and love (12for12k.org being a great positive example). This is true for any new technology we use, and invariably its this fact that plays itself out and ruins the current technological wave, setting up the frustrated landscape for the next one.  Democracy, steam power, electricity, telegraphs, telephones, televisions, the Internet, and the web have all been heralded as the arrival of Utopia, and although there has been progress in each wave, it seems there are things we want that technological change can not bring to us.
  8. Always ask “What problem am I trying to solve?” The smartest thing to do with something new is to ask what is it you need it to do for you. Recognize  good marketing will not make up for bad products or incompetent services.  If your company is marketing itself well to customers, or your social life is fine, perhaps you don’t need a revolution and need something much simpler and more realistic from social media. Spend time figuring out what you need. If you want to experiment and see for yourself, that’s awesome, but know that’s what you’re doing. But above all use whatever media/communication tools or methods work for you, whether they are old or new, no matter what anyone says, including me.

If you liked this post, you might also like my general purpose essay, How to detect bullshit.

Update: @jmichelle posted a response, In defense of social media, on O’Reilly Radar. I responded in the comments.

Update, part 2: six months later, here’s a follow up post: twitter reconsidered.

A lesson in customer service (why my site was down today)

I was out and about today, and got home to find email from a friend telling me my site was down (Thx Livia). Hmmm. Ok. Checked it out, and they’re right.

So I check the dreamhost status site, and there’s nothing for today. Ok, so I contact dreamhost directly. I hear back quickly.

I’m told they suspect there is a script running on my site that used too much memory, shutting down the entire site. I’m sent a reference for how to investigate this myself to figure out what might be the cause.

Meanwhile. My site is still down.

I say WTF. I can’t fix this if I can’t get to my site. And moreso, why not charge me $50 or whatever you want for going over my memory limit, a fee I’d gladly pay, instead of HAVING MY SITE DOWN AN ENTIRE DAY.

I ask them to temporarily bump my memory to get the site up, which they thankfully do, and fix the likely cause of the problem (a plugin I didn’t update when I upgraded to Wordpress 2.7).

Lessons:

  1. Always inform customers if you are turning their service off, regardless of the reason. I should not need a friend to let me know, or be surprised on my own, even if I’m to blame for the reason the site is down. Always notify me when, and if possible before, you turn off what I’m paying for.
  2. It’s better customer service to charge extra for doing the right thing, and keeping *my customers* out of it by loaning me more memory. It’s done for bandwidth, for overdraft charges at the bank, why not for memory usage? Charge me whatever you want – just don’t ever let my site go down.

    3. Anyway, end of story is I’m sorry the site was down. And end of the line I’m to blame. Dreamhost has always been a mixed bag of good and bad. They suggested their PS service, which does allow for variable memory use at a price, which I’ll check out.

The lost cult of Microsoft program managers

Some of you know I worked at Microsoft years ago (‘94-’03) as what they call a program manager. In any other company the job would be known as team lead or project manager, and it was an awesome job.

When I was hired 1994 there was a cult around the role. Program Managers had a reputation for being people worthy of being afraid of for one reason: they knew how to get things done. If you got in their way, they would smile. And then eat you. They drove, led, ran, persuaded, hunted, fought and stuck their necks out for their teams with an intensity most people couldn’t match. The sort of people who eliminated all bullshit within a 10 foot radius of their presence. How to be this way, and do it without being an asshole, was one of the things I tried to capture in my book, Making things happen. All teams need at least one leader who has this kind of passion and talent regardless of where you work or what you’re working on.

But that cult has faded. I have many friends and a few clients at Microsoft, and talk with more through email and on the pmclinic discussion list, and I’m convinced true PMs are a dying breed. I suspect they were a dying breed before I started at the company and I was just lucky to be hired into a pocket still running strong. Group managers like Joe Belfiore, Hadi Partovi, Hillel Cooperman, and Chris Jones all created a landscape for PMs like me to drive and lead their teams, and made it possible for us to do a lot of good for our teams that no other role could do.

One change is the enormous growth of Microsoft since I was hired. I started in ‘94 as employee #14,000 something, and now there are nearly 90,000. Bureaucracy, overhead and dead weight collect in big successful companies and Microsoft is no different. This makes it much harder to consolidate the kind of power a PM needs to behave the way I described above. The PM role has been stretched so thin there are PMs for everything, and if ever a position needs to be created that isn’t quite a marketing, programmer or tester position, but isn’t a leadership or management role, the PM label gets used anyway. Somehow it’s a crime for there to be more than 10 job titles at a company. I’m not sure why.

In many cases teams have so many PMs, and authority is so loosely distributed, than would should be simple decisions require a meeting of 8 or 10 or 15 people. Cycles of meetings on the theme of “are you ok with this? How about you? And you?” As if everyone deserves a vote on every decision. This kills momentum and wastes the value of what PMs can do. And as this goes on for years, with larger and larger staffs, no one knows what it’s like to have a clear, fast process for making basic decisions. Few remember what it feels like to be on team that has synergy, clarity, trust and focus, eliminating the need for hand-holding, triple level reconfirmations, and spending hours every week un-reversing decisions that should never have been reversed in the first place.

I hear from PMs who I suspect no longer recognize 3 hour meetings that are 100% guaranteed to be a complete waste of time, because many of their meetings are complete wastes of time. By the same token, I know PMs who work on teams that are entirely out of control, and failing in the marketplace, who think it’s normal for a team to be entirely out of control and failing in the marketplace. They’ve never seen anything else. And sadly in some cases, neither have their bosses, or (gulp) their VPs. They believe a PM is supposed to feel, much of the time, useless, ignored, and in the way. Instead of realizing that those feelings come from their failure, and the group managers failure to enable them, to do what the role was designed for.

I gave a lecture at Microsoft before I left in ‘03 titled The problem with program managers that outlined many of these problems and what can be done to avoid them. All management roles run the risk of being wastes of space, and project management roles are no different. And if there’s interest I’ll pull some of those nuggets out into future blog posts.

But are there still surviving pockets of old school PMs? If so, I’d love to hear from you, at Microsoft or elsewhere.

Do we suck at the basics?

The longer I’m on this planet, the more I think the problem with everything is someone’s failure to get the basics right. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been invited to companies or to talk about projects going on here or there, only to hear some basic, fundamental principle being violated without anyone screaming or raising the red flag. First. Am I right? Do most people, most of the time, suck at one of the basics of what they’re supposed to be professionals at? And if so, why is this?

In management / design / business circles I know for certain of one reason. Flat out hubris. For an executive to say: “This project sucks because I have failed to organize this team effectively” requires a huge amount of humility. Much more humility than is required to say something like “Our innovation infrastructure needs to be redistributed to support the new rate of change”. Or some other bullshit that sounds complex, makes him seem smart, and entirely distracts people away from what might solve the problem: identifying the problem in the simplest terms possible.

We habitually hide the core problem under layers of noise and complexity because it makes us feel safer, and feel more competent than if we confessed to the truth. Even the best baseball players strike out hundreds of times a year. Yet they don’t explain it away or invent jargon for it in the way people in the professional world do for unavoidable failures of a simple nature.

Worse, once we have been doing something for 5 or 10 years we convince ourselves we must be experts. And to admit we got a basic wrong would be fatal to our reputation. But honesty is so rare among experts, to call something what it is would likely enhance someones reputation way more than hurt it, especially if they know how to go about fixing this basic problem.

Case in point #1: What percentage of people in every profession do you think flat out suck at what they do? 10%? 20%? 50%? There has to be a number. What do you think it is? I say it must be at least 25%. People whose peers would never ever hire them to do what they are paid to do.

Case in point #2: I’d say at least half of all professional managers have not earned the trust of their team. It has to be at least half. Now if you don’t have the trust of your team, no budget, no brilliant plan, no clever organizational model, is going to save you. Your team will always under perform if they do no trust their leader. End of story.

So as regards the working world: want to fix 50% of the projects out there? Forget all the fancy stuff. Convince these managers to find the guts to trust their own people, and then in reciprocation, the team will grow to trust the manager.

And on it goes. I’m convinced you can take any challenge a manager out there believes is intractable, impenetrable, something so complex and advanced they believe you’d need a PhD in 25 disciplines just to understand it, and slice it down to one or two fundamental problems that if called out, could be solved and transform the situation.

What do you think? Does everyone need a reality check at the basics of their craft? Or am I just being cranky?

The pleasure of turning things off

The irony of my writings about innovation is how little interest I have in the latest trends. Sure, I keep up enough to have meaningful commentary: it’s my job. But at the same time everyone I meet in the context of “innovation expert” is surprised I don’t own an i-phone, mostly use a 2003 model laptop, and often prefer writing on legal pads to word processors. I am a total throwback.

Despite my knowledge of design and how things work, I’m mostly useless in talk about the latest gadget or software: unless you show it to me so I can play with it, odds are good I haven’t used it before. I’m a Luddite sympathizer. A technological skeptic. My passions lie in the timeless: the things so deeply good they connect and re-connect with us for years, decades and lifetimes. I’m ridiculously happy about the pursuit of timeless things, and many of my favorite timeless things do not have on or off switches.

I’m not an old man, but I’m not young either. At 36 (!) I’ve been fortunate to figure out many things that make me happy and it turns out a good percentage of them are not electronic. In fact I find my most memorable days in my life involved less time spent in front of computers, rather than more.

The trap is that so much of the world, the world of my generation, spirals around the web and its various technologies – there is simply no choice but to spend hours a day in it. I love its conveniences but its burdens are almost as numerous. I swear, if I could swing it somehow, I’m convinced I’d be a happier man in a lifestyle where the majority of my interactions with people were in person, rather than online.

If I could conjure up my fantasy world, a world comprised of amusement parks, water parks, huge untouched forests, Greenwich village (hey, it’s a fantasy), joyous, funny, passionate people, all on a safe tropical beach island, with basketball courts with great runs everywhere, all things online would be a nice cute treat I’d taste maybe once every few days. The real world, when done right, kicks the virtual worlds ass. I mean, it’s not even close. Great websites and video games, as much as I enjoy them, don’t hold a candle to great meals with great friends and fantastic sex with great lovers.

Now sure, technology can enhance the real world. No argument. But so little of what we put our techno-faith in adds something good, without taking something good away. I score most gadgetry as a net loss.

I take pleasure and pride in my willingness to turn things off. When on vacation I don’t long for the web or for checking e-mail. But that said, as of late I’ve found myself victimized by my own choices: working alone, traveling often, as writers and lecturers often do, makes in person interactions with close friends less frequent than I’d like. I meet many people, which is great, but spreading myself across so many relationships can’t help but make those connections thinner than we all admit. And as much as I’m fond of using online interactions to fill gaps, the gap remains. And somehow I know it’s the kind of gap no combination of IM, twitter, e-mail, blogs, or whatever the next communication thing we proclaim as our savior can ever fill. But it’s there, and it’s the way of the day, so there I am.

I can’t close this missive with a confident prescription – I know only who I am and not who you are. And I confess that often at parties, when I’ve been drinking, I comically ramble on about the above (I’m an entirely passionate, philosophically comic and lovable drunk) – and when I do I know most people think I’m nuts. Cute, charming maybe, but nuts. So I don’t expect my advice to mean much, but it’s worth a shot, just for kicks.

Right now, turn at least one thing off. If you can, turn all your gadgets and beeping things off, and listen to the sound of the world without them. Then stop reading this, or whatever thread the web teases you with next and do something crazy like… go outside. It’s summer! Grab your favorite person within 500 feet of you (by definition, there is always one person you like the most of those available within 500 feet), and go for walk. Lie in the grass under the sun and split clouds with your mind. Spend more time and money than you should at lunch (dont you dare eat at your desk! It’s a crime!). Food becomes you, literally, so be mindful of it while you eat it. And talk to someone while eating it, or at least watch and observe the waiters while they work, they do more than you usually notice. A long, mindful break from digital things can do wonders for the mind. And I bet when you do return to whatever digital thing you felt you could not leave, you wont feel so dependent on it as you did before. And that’s a good feeling to have.

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