Created at: 2024-09-04
This is a great book for someone new to management or even for veterans looking to brush off some dust on management and leadership skills.
This book focuses on management for creative workers, with the authors' expertise being in software development management.
The advice is mostly sound and timeless. The first version of this book dates back to 1987 and though much content has been upgraded in the 3rd edition (2013), I have a hunch that it will remain important for years to come.
Management is a tricky subject. Having read a bit on it by now, I can attest that it is very hard to come across good source material like this one.
While I don't have major criticism to provide, I think that this book could be enhanced by including factual research information.
Much of it reads as a series of essays aggregated into different areas. Although a couple of interesting studies were discussed, I think that not only this book, but the management area as a whole, lacks more directed research into leadership topics and also long-term measurement of results.
These are my highlights separated into relevant sections:
You seldom need to take Draconian measures to keep your people working; most of them love their work. You may even have to take steps sometimes to make them work less, and thus get more meaningful work done
When I’m on my home turf, I play tennis two or three times a week in groups organized by a charming fellow named Mike. Mike is our leader. It’s Mike who decides the matchups: who plays with whom and against whom. He’s the one who shuffles the players (16 of us on four courts) after each set so we all have different partners for all three sets. He invariably makes good pairings so that near the end of a half hour you can look across the courts and see four scores like 5 to 4, 6 to 6, 7 to 6, and 5 to 5. He has a great booming voice, easy to hear even when he is three courts away. He sets the meeting times, negotiates the schedules for court time, and makes sure there are subs for anyone who needs to be away. Nobody gave Mike the job of leading the group; he just stepped up and took it. His leadership is uncontested; the rest of us are just in awe of our good fortune that he leads us as he does. He gets nothing for it except our gratitude and esteem.
Management, in particular, requires holistic thinking, heuristic judgment, and intuition based upon experience.
Projects on which the boss applied no schedule pressure whatsoever (“Just wake me up when you’re done.”) had the highest productivity of all.
Three rules of thumb seem to apply whenever you measure variations in performance over a sample of individuals.
Years of experience: People who had ten years of experience did not outperform those with two years of experience. There was no correlation between experience and performance except that those with less than six months’ experience with the language used in the exercise did not do as well as the rest of the sample.
In London for one year’s International Conference on Software Engineering, I spent an afternoon with Tom Gilb, the author of Software Metrics and dozens of published papers on measurement of the development process. I found that an easy way to get him heated up was to suggest that something you need to know is “unmeasurable.” The man was offended by the very idea. He favored me that day with a description of what he considered a fundamental truth about measurability. The idea seemed at once so wise and so encouraging that I copied it verbatim into my journal under the heading of Gilb’s Law: Anything you need to quantify can be measured in some way that is superior to not measuring it at all. Gilb’s Law doesn’t promise you that measurement will be free or even cheap, and it may not be perfect—just better than nothing.
Not all work roles require that you attain a state of flow in order to be productive, but for anyone involved in engineering, design, development, writing, or like tasks, flow is a must. These are high-momentum tasks. It’s only when you’re in flow that the work goes well.
If you could effect some change in the people you manage and make them much more productive and goal-directed but also less controllable, would you do it? The answer to this question distinguishes the great managers from the merely mediocre. The mediocre manager is too insecure to give up the trappings. The great manager knows that people can’t be controlled in any meaningful sense anyway.
In the spring of 1932, efficiency experts ran a series of tests at the Hawthorne Western Electric Company to determine the effects of various environmental parameters on productivity. They tried raising the light level, and they noted that productivity went up. Then they tried lowering the light level, and they noted that productivity went up higher still. They speculated that turning the lights off entirely might send productivity through the roof. What seemed to be happening was that the change itself wasn’t as important as the act of changing. People were charmed by differentness, they liked the attention, they were intrigued by novelty. This has come to be called the Hawthorne Effect. Loosely stated, it says that people perform better when they’re trying something new.
Next time you hear someone talking about productivity, listen carefully to hear if the speaker ever uses the term “employee turnover.” Chances are that he or she will not.
We all know that a new employee is quite useless on Day One or even worse than useless, since someone else’s time is required to begin bringing the new person up to speed. By the end of a few months, the new person is doing some useful work; within five months, he or she is at full working capacity. A reasonable assessment of start-up cost is therefore approximately three lost work-months per new hire. (Obviously, the start-up cost is worse or much worse to the extent that the work to be performed is highly esoteric.) The total cost of replacing each person is the equivalent of four-and-a-half to five months of employee cost or about 20 percent of the cost of keeping that employee for the full two years on the job.
If people only stick around a year or two, the only way to conserve the best people is to promote them quickly. That means near beginners being promoted into first-level management positions. They may have only five years of experience and perhaps less than a year with the company. There is something very disconcerting about these numbers. A person with a work life of, say, forty years will spend five years working and thirty-five managing. That implies an exceedingly tall, narrow hierarchy. Fifteen percent of the staff is doing work, with 85 percent managing. As little as 10 percent of the cost could be spent on the workers, with 90 percent going to reward the managers. Even Marx didn’t foresee such top-heaviness of capitalistic structures.
Many of us have come to believe that companies that promote early are where the action is. That’s natural, because as young workers we’re eager to get ahead. But from the corporate perspective, late promotion is a sign of health. In companies with low turnover, promotion into the first-level management position comes only after as much as ten years with the company. (This has long been true of some of the strongest organizations within IBM, for example.) The people at the lowest level have on the average at least five years’ experience. The hierarchy is low and flat.
There is a sense of eliteness on a good team. Team members feel they’re part of something unique. They feel they’re better than the run of the mill. They have a cocky, SWAT Team attitude that may be faintly annoying to people who aren’t part of the group. There is invariably a feeling of joint ownership of the product built by the jelled team. Participants are pleased to have their names grouped together on a product or a part of one. The individual is eager for peer review. The team space is decorated with views of the product as it approaches completion. The final sign of a jelled team is the obvious enjoyment that people take in their work. Jelled teams just feel healthy. The interactions are easy and confident and warm.
If the staff comes to believe it’s not allowed to make any errors of its own, the message that you don’t trust them comes through loud and clear. There is no message you can send that will better inhibit team formation.
The common thread is that good managers provide frequent easy opportunities for the team to succeed together. The opportunities may be tiny pilot subprojects, or demonstrations, or simulations, anything that gets the team quickly into the habit of succeeding together.
Presented below is an admittedly simplistic list of the elements of a chemistry-building strategy for a healthy organization: • Make a cult of quality. • Provide lots of satisfying closure. • Build a sense of eliteness. • Allow and encourage heterogeneity. • Preserve and protect successful teams. • Provide strategic but not tactical direction.
Particularly when the team is coming together, frequent closure is important. Team members need to get into the habit of succeeding together and liking it. This is part of the mechanism by which the team builds momentum.
This may offend your sensibilities as a manager, but managers are usually not part of the teams that they manage. Teams are made up of peers, equals that function as equals. The manager is most often outside the team, giving occasional direction from above and clearing away administrative and procedural obstacles. By definition, the manager is not a peer and so can’t be part of the peer group.
A little bit of heterogeneity can be an enormous aid to create a jelled team. Add one handicapped developer to a newly formed work group, and the odds go up that the team will knit. The same effect can result from adding a co-op student or an ex-admin on the first project after being retrained. Whatever the heterogeneous element is, it takes on symbolic importance to team members. It is a clear signal that it’s okay not to be a clone, okay not to fit into the corporate mold of Uniform Plastic Person. The saddest example of the overly homogeneous work group is the all-male team. Of course, women function as well on teams as men. Any man who has worked on mixed teams would find it hard to imagine ever again working in the all-male environment. That was our grandfathers’ sad lot.
People want to accept responsibility, but they won’t unless given acceptable degrees of freedom to control their own success.
In Australia, where striking uses up nearly as much labor time as working, there is a charming form of strike called work to rule. Rather than walk off the job, workers open up a fat book of procedures and announce, “Until you give us what we’re asking for, we’re going to work exactly to the rule.” When the air-traffic controllers do this, for instance, they can only land one plane every seven minutes. If doctors were to do it, an appendectomy would take a week.
Particularly when a team is forming, it makes good business sense to fight for travel money to get team members out of the office together. If there is a remote client site, ship them off all-expenses-paid to check out that territory. When there is a thought-intensive deliverable due, put them into a
There may be many and varied causes of emotional reaction in one’s personal life, but in the workplace, the major arouser of emotions is threatened self-esteem.
Think back over a particularly enjoyable work experience from your career. What was it that made the experience such a pleasure? The simplistic answer is, “Challenge.” Good work experiences
Believing that workers will automatically accept organizational goals is the sign of naïve managerial optimism.
The trade-off between price and quality does not exist in Japan. Rather, the idea that high quality brings on cost reduction is widely accepted.
A policy of “Quality—If Time Permits” will assure that no quality at all sneaks into the product.
Number of defects: Nearly a third of the participants completed the exercise with zero defects. As a group, the zero-defect workers paid no performance penalty for doing more precise work. (In fact, they took slightly less time, on the average,
The judgment that a still-imperfect product is “good enough” is the death knell for a jelling team. There can be no impetus to bind together with your cohorts for the joint satisfaction gained from delivering mediocre work. The opposite attitude, of “only perfect is good enough for us,” gives the team a real chance. This cult of quality is the strongest catalyst for team formation.
Your marketplace, your product consumers, your clients, and your upper management are never going to make the case for high quality. Extraordinary quality doesn’t make good short-term economic sense. When team members develop a cult of quality, they always turn out something that’s better than what their market is asking for. They can do this, but only when protected from short-term economics. In the long run, this always pays off. People get high on quality and outdo themselves to protect it.
During the 1960s, researchers at Cornell University conducted a series of tests on the effects of working with music. They polled a group of computer science students and divided the students into two groups, those who liked to have music in the background while they worked (studied) and those who did not. Then they put half of each group together in a silent room, and the other half of each group in a different room equipped with earphones and a musical selection. Participants in both rooms were given a programming problem to work out from specification. To no one’s surprise, participants in the two rooms performed about the same in speed and accuracy of programming. As any kid who does his arithmetic homework with the music on knows, the part of the brain required for arithmetic and related logic is unbothered by music—there’s another brain center that listens to the music. The Cornell experiment, however, contained a hidden wild card. The specification required that an output data stream be formed through a series of manipulations on numbers in the input data stream. For example, participants had to shift each number two digits to the left and then divide by one hundred and so on, perhaps completing a dozen operations in total. Although the specification never said it, the net effect of all the operations was that each output number was necessarily equal to its input number. Some people realized this and others did not. Of those who figured it out, the overwhelming majority came from the quiet room. Many of the everyday tasks performed by professional workers are done in the serial processing center of the left brain. Music will not interfere particularly with this work, since it’s the brain’s holistic right side that digests music. But not all of the work is centered in the left brain. There is that occasional breakthrough that makes you say “Ahah!” and steers you toward an ingenious bypass that may save months or years of work. The creative leap involves right-brain function. If the right brain is busy listening to “1,001 Strings” on Muzak, the opportunity for a creative leap is lost.
Get the right people. • Make them happy so they don’t want to leave. • Turn them loose. Of course, you have to coordinate the efforts of even the best team so that all the individual contributions add up to an integrated whole. But that’s the relatively mechanical part of management. For most efforts, success or failure is in the cards from the moment the team is formed and the initial directions set out.
One caveat about pilot projects: Don’t experiment with more than one aspect of development technology on any given project. For all the talk about the importance of standards, it’s surprising how often managers abandon all standards on the rare project that is designated a pilot. They often try out new hardware, new software, new quality control procedures, matrix management, and new prototyping techniques, all on the same project.
First of all, it’s worth saying that project risk is a good thing, a likely indicator of value. Projects that have real value but little or no risk were all done ages ago. The ones that matter today are laden with risk.
If the manager and his or her team aren’t going to do risk management, someone else has to. The best project manager in this situation is the one who can say, “Look, we’re willing to take on this challenge, this scary delivery date, and we’ll do our best to meet it. We’ll have no time to manage the risk that we won’t make it in spite of our best efforts, but somebody better manage that risk. Unless we see that specific plans are being made for the eventuality of our late delivery, we’re not going to be able to think of this as a challenge; it’s more of a stupid, desperation crapshoot.”
The top quartile, those who did the exercise most rapidly and effectively, work in space that is substantially different from that of the bottom quartile. The top performers’ space is quieter, more private, better protected from interruption, and there is more of it.
The prudent manager could not consider moving people into cheaper, noisier, and more crowded quarters without first assessing whether worker effectiveness would be impaired. So, you might expect that the planners who have undertaken a decade-long program to change our office space into the voguish open-plan format must first have done some very careful productivity analysis. Not to do so would have demonstrated an irresponsible unconcern for the environment.
Not so long ago, they worked in two- and three-person offices with walls, doors, and windows. (You remember walls, doors, and windows, don’t you?) In such space, one could work in quiet or conduct meetings with colleagues without disrupting neighbors. Then, without warning, open-plan seating was upon us like a plague upon the land. The advocates of the new format produced not one shred of evidence that effectiveness would not be impaired. They really couldn’t. Meaningful measurement of productivity is a complex and elusive thing. It has to be performed differently in each different work sector. It takes expertise, careful study, and lots of data collection.
The study was designed by the architect Gerald McCue with the assistance of IBM area managers.1 Researchers observed the work processes in action in current work spaces and in mock-ups of proposed work spaces. They watched programmers, engineers, quality control workers, and managers go about their normal activities. From their studies, they concluded that a minimum accommodation for the mix of people slated to occupy the new space would be the following: • 100 square feet of dedicated space per worker • 30 square feet of work surface per person • Noise protection in the form of enclosed offices or 6-foot-high partitions (they ended up with about half of all professional personnel in enclosed one- and two-person offices)
Across the whole Coding War Games sample, 58 percent complained that their workplace was not acceptably quiet; 61 percent complained that it wasn’t sufficiently private; 54 percent reported that they had a workplace at home that was better than the workplace provided by the company.
Saving money on space may be costing you a fortune.
In my years at Bell Labs, we worked in two-person offices. They were spacious, quiet, and the phones could be diverted. I shared my office with Wendl Thomis, who went on to build a small empire as an electronic toy maker. In those days, he was working on the Electronic Switching System fault dictionary. The dictionary scheme relied upon the notion of n-space proximity, a concept that was hairy enough to challenge even Wendl’s powers of concentration. One afternoon, I was bent over a program listing while Wendl was staring into space, his feet propped up on the desk. Our boss came in and asked, “Wendl! What are you doing?” Wendl said, “I’m thinking.” And the boss said, “Can’t you do that at home?”
Do you often interrupt a discussion with co-workers or friends to answer a phone? Of course you do. You don’t even consider not answering the phone. Yet what you’re doing is a violation of the common rules of fairness, taking people out of order, just because they insist loudly (BBRRRRIINNNGGGG!) on your attention.
What was going on in the mind of the systems department head who wrote this in a memo: It has come to my attention that many of you, when you are busy, are letting your phones ring for three rings and thus get switched over to one of the secretaries. With all these interruptions, the secretaries can never get any productive work done. The official policy here is that when you’re at your desk you will answer your phone before the third ring. . . .
There are some prevalent symbols of success and failure in creating a sensible workplace. The most obvious symbol of success is the door. When there are sufficient doors, workers can control noise and interruptibility to suit their changing needs.
The degradation of working conditions that has affected most of us over the past decades has depended on the consent of the victim. That doesn’t mean that one such victim could have halted the trend by saying, “No, I won’t work in noisy, cramped, exposed space.” But it does mean that we as a group haven’t hollered loud enough and often enough about the counterproductive side effects of saving money on space.
Management, at its best, should make sure there is enough space, enough quiet, and enough ways to ensure privacy so that people can create their own sensible work space. Uniformity has no place in this view. You have to grin and bear it when people put up odd pictures or clutter their desks or move the furniture around or merge their offices. When they’ve got it just the way they want it, they’ll be able to put it out of their minds entirely and get on with the work.
People cannot work effectively if their workspace is too enclosed or too exposed. A good workspace strikes the balance. . . . You feel more comfortable in a workspace if there is a wall behind you. . . . There should be no blank wall closer than eight feet in front of you. (As you work, you want to occasionally look up and rest your eyes by focusing them on something farther away than the desk. If there is a blank wall closer than eight feet your eyes will not change focus and they get no relief. In this case you feel too enclosed.) . . . You should not be able to hear noises very different from the kind you make, from your workplace. Your workplace should be sufficiently enclosed to cut out noises which are a different kind from the ones you make. There is some evidence that one can concentrate on a task better if people around him are doing the same thing, not something else. . . . Workspaces should allow you to face in different directions. —Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language (Alexander’s book Notes on the Synthesis of Form, for example, is considered a kind of holy book by designers of all kinds.)
Today’s modular cubicle is a masterpiece of compromise: It gives you no meaningful privacy and yet still manages to make you feel isolated.
We are trained to accept windowless office space as inevitable. The company would love for every one of us to have a window, we hear, but that just isn’t realistic. Sure it is. There is a perfect proof that sufficient windows can be built into a space without excessive cost. The existence proof is the hotel, any hotel. You can’t even imagine being shown a hotel room with no window. You wouldn’t stand for it. (And this is for a space you’re only going to sleep in.) So hotels are constructed with lots of windows.
Organizational busy work tends to expand to fill the working day.
There are a million ways to lose a workday, but not even a single way to get one back.
As the number of vested parties to any action increases, meeting population goes up. Additionally, meetings give visibility, an essential factor to anyone who hopes to rise in big-company hierarchy. You don’t get noticed by listening thoughtfully, so anyone who’s there for visibility is likely to be a talker. The worst meetings feel like congregations of windbags with nobody listening and everybody speaking or waiting to speak. Because there are so many who need to speak, meeting duration increases seemingly without bound.
A meeting that is specifically called to get something done might be called a working meeting. (The others, you might assume, are nonworking meetings. More about them in the next section.) A working meeting is typically called to reach a decision. Who should be invited? That’s easy, the people who need to agree before the decision can be judged made. Nobody else. To make sure no one is blindsided, it’s essential that the working meeting have an agenda relevant to its purpose and that it stick to that agenda. Thus, no one risks anything by not attending because they come to have confidence that off-agenda matters won’t be discussed. No one has to attend defensively. Working meetings have a charming characteristic. You know when they’re done. When the decision has been reached, there is no further need to meet. Before it’s been reached, the meeting is not yet complete.
A meeting that is ended by the clock is a ceremony. Its purpose is not to get any particular thing decided. It’s all FYI. The FYIing often happens in a ritualistic manner: quick intro and announcements by a boss, followed by serial one-on-one interactions between the boss and each subordinate. At any given moment, two people are involved. The others are nominally listening, with emphasis on the nominally. If they have their laptops open, their focus is somewhere else. The ceremony is a series of conversations, and conversations are a good thing. What’s not such a good thing is all the non-listeners locked in the room while the conversations take place. Those who believe that meetings should be replaced with conversations observe that the one-on-ones might just as well take place somewhere else with all the rest of the participants released to do real work. There is occasionally a real need for ceremony in the workplace. A ceremony might be called to celebrate some accomplishment, to lay out a strategic change of direction, or to evaluate a project at its end. All of these justifiable ceremonies are a bit out of the ordinary. That’s what makes them justifiable. It’s the regular ceremony that needs to be suspect.
Life is short. If you need to know everything in order to do anything, you’re not going to get much done.
One of the reasons that organizations are bogged down with everybody plowing through endless numbers of endless e-mails is that there is an unwritten rule at work. The rule is, Silence gives consent. If someone sends you an e-mail that proposes to do some wacky thing and you don’t object, under this rule you have effectively given your consent. If you find yourself spending hours each day reading through stuff that is of no real value to you, chances are it is because you have to worry about your consent being taken for granted because your name was on the CC line. To free yourself and everyone else of this drudgery, you need to repeal the rule. Without knowing the ins and outs of your organization, we can’t say how you need to go about it. But it’s worth doing. An effective repeal—establishing that only explicit consent gives consent—coul save your organization person-centuries of wasted time.
When we argue logically for change, one tactic is to contrast how the new world will be (good) compared to the current situation (bad). But think: Who helped implement the current situation? Who are the masters of the ways that we currently work? Could these people possibly take offense at any diminution of the current mode? Damn right they could. William Bridges, in Managing Transitions, suggests that we never demean our old ways. Instead, we need to celebrate the old as a way to help change happen. For example, Folks, the CGS Close-in Guidance System has been running for 14 years. We estimate that it has perfectly handled over 1,000,000 take-offs and landings. The hardware platform has become technically obsolete, and there is some new remote sensing technology that we can take advantage of. Now we have the chance to redesign and rebuild the entire system. We need you and your expertise gained over these years of successful CGS experience to help us succeed in this effort.
The self-transforming organization has to face up to the following irreducible risk: Learning is limited by an organization’s ability to keep its people.
Flattening the org. chart by gutting middle management is a sure recipe for decreased learning. But the converse is not necessarily true: Holding on to middle management doesn’t, by itself, make learning more likely to prosper. There is another ingredient required for that, one that is seldom evaluated properly and almost never cultivated. In order for a vital learning center to form, middle managers must communicate with each other and learn to work together in effective harmony. This is an extremely rare phenomenon.