B-Daddy's Book of Management - Update

This is a re-post of my earlier post. I knew I had a tenth rule, but couldn't remember it, scroll down to #10 for the update.

I have had some success as a manager, which always amazes me. I am not a particularly brilliant leader, but I have had great people working for me, making me look good. I have a few simple ideas about management that I want to record for posterity. If I get around to it, I will flesh out some of these ideas and perhaps add to them in future posts.

Rules of B-Daddy's Book of Management.

1. Plan to do nothing, and you will certainly achieve your goals.

2. Management is hard, leadership is better and supervision is most difficult of all.
Corollary: Hire people who don't need supervision.

3. Hiring is the manager's most important decision.

4. Stay on message. Communicate consistently. Repeat your theme repetitively.

5. The commodity in shortest supply is management attention.
Corollary 1: The most important word in a manager's vocabulary is "no."
Corollary 2: Email is an evil leach of your time.

7. Understand your firm's economic engine and your unit's.

8. Be careful what you ask for, you just might get it.

9. Deliver the bad news yourself, let your people deliver the good news.

10. If you can't cover yourself in glory, cover yourself in paper.

The B-Daddy Book of Management

I have had some success as a manager, which always amazes me. I am not a particularly brilliant leader, but I have had great people working for me, making me look good. I have a few simple ideas about management that I want to record for posterity. If I get around to it, I will flesh out some of these ideas and perhaps add to them in future posts.

Rules of B-Daddy's Book of Management.

1. Plan to do nothing, and you will certainly achieve your goals.

2. Management is hard, leadership is better and supervision is most difficult of all.
Corollary: Hire people who don't need supervision.

3. Hiring is the manager's most important decision.

4. Stay on message. Communicate consistently. Repeat your theme repetitively.

5. The commodity in shortest supply is management attention.
Corollary 1: The most important word in a manager's vocabulary is "no."
Corollary 2: Email is an evil leach of your time.

7. Understand your firm's economic engine and your unit's.

8. Be careful what you ask for, you just might get it.

9. Deliver the bad news yourself, let your people deliver the good news.

I Was a Six Sigma Coach for Putin

Well this explains a lot. It turns out that one of the Russian spies was a management consultant spouting all the usual platitudes of modern management theory. Thomas Frank, with whom I usually disagree, has a hilarious article on the Russian spies' methods of infiltration. The spy pictured at left, Donald Heathfield, has his own web site, where he inspires us with the following management speak:

As an advisor to major corporations, he focuses on building the capacity of organizations to develop and implement future strategies and on the creation of tools that enable this process.

I'm jazzed. This is either proof that these Russians were very clever imitators of our culture, or... (drum roll please) they have been responsible for destroying large swaths of the American corporate landscape with ridiculous theories about management effectiveness. Hence the title of this article, stolen from Mr. Rich.

Before his web site is removed and perhaps lost to posterity, I have captured his personal page to document the diabolical treachery of the Russians.

Management and Jesus

Pastor Jim's sermon this morning started with the injunction to learn humbly a message of many scriptures. I find it interesting that this message is also born out in the more serious books on management I have read recently, Good to Great, The Fifth Discipline and 7 Habits. I continue to be amazed that the application of Christian principles are "discovered" by modern research and touted as something "new." Don't get me wrong, those are excellent books, but the application of their principals is made much easier by the discipline that comes from following Christ. The longer I live the more convinced I am that unbelief is as much an act of faith as belief, maybe more so, when so many of the principles of our faith are born out by research.

Management Gobbledygook

What is wrong with managers? Over at KT Cat's place, he has been lampooning all manner of management practice including Lean Six Sigma and corporate pronouncements on, well I can barely figure it out. Managers are forced to read a lot of theory and swill a lot of jargon to keep up with the latest fads imposed from above. But it baffles me that managers try to feed the same jargon to employees who frankly just want to do their jobs. I hope that he doesn't mind that I am lifting this video he made with xtranormal:



Almost everything discussed in that unintelligible video actually makes sense or does some good. But the managers who allowed that crap to get published make themselves appear to be fools. Why can't we managers talk like this:

"We use the Balanced Score Card (BSC) to make sure we don't forget ALL the ingredients of our success by too much focus on one area. We balance keeping our customer happy, keeping our costs under control, developing our people's talents, and improving the way we do our work, all of which will help us accomplish our mission."

"The network talent model means that our people need more than just technical skills, every employee also needs leadership, management and teamwork skills."

"Being a high performing organization means that we stay focused on the work that actually contributes to the products our customers want, and seeks to eliminate work that doesn't help achieve that end."

Now that wasn't so hard, was it?

Lean Six Sigma

KT posted a hilarious video on Lean Six Sigma (LSS), a method embraced in industry and government for process improvement. I went on an extended rant in KT's comments section which I have liberated to a post here.

My experience with this method of process improvement has been uniformly miserable, failing to achieve anything of significance. Recently I was again provided the results of an LSS effort that again resulted in a new process but no reasonable method of implementation. This is the third time in a row. Each time we are asked to then build an information system to implement something conceived by LSS, and we have to start over. I was told that, at a minimum LSS would deliver "shovel ready" requirements against which software could be delivered, but that has not been the case.

The root cause of this failure initially eluded me, because I don't believe that anyone is intentionally stupid or malicious, but you can't tell by the results of LSS. Thinking about Stephen Covey's 7 Habits helped me dissect the mystery. Habit 2, begin with the end in mind, provided the insight. LSS, by its nature, starts with no particular end in mind, just the idea of improvement. As a result no actual improvement comes from this undefined goal.

A brief example. We set a goal that over 80% of new employees would have a functioning email account and computer account on their first day of employment. We made significant changes in the way we performed initial information assurance and other training and achieved that goal. We are trying to ratchet up to 85%. But we get no credit for huge process improvement that has saved millions of dollars in lost productivity because employees previously waited around for up to two weeks before they could use a computer. Sorry, no LSS credit for the poor slobs who did all the work to save the organization millions (and I can prove it.) (Achieving LSS savings is often put into employee objectives. In this case, we started with a particular goal and actually effected process improvement, because we knew where we wanted to go.

Blinking and Thinking

I started a new online class this week, which will be eating into my blogging time. The class is grandiosely titled Leadership for the Information Age, but since I like grandiosity, just look at my blog mastheads, I figured this would be right up my alley. The very first reading assignment was from the book Blink, by Malcom Gladwell, a terrific read by a terrific writer. The excerpt we were asked to read is about "thin slicing" or rapid cognition, or what most of us call intuition. I guess the point of the reading was to make us aware of differing styles of decision making. But for me, I don't need to reinforce bad habits, and that excerpt from Blink does just that. Here's some quotes from Gladwell's web site for a taste of what I am talking about:

It's a book about rapid cognition, about the kind of thinking that happens in a blink of an eye. When you meet someone for the first time, or walk into a house you are thinking of buying, or read the first few sentences of a book, your mind takes about two seconds to jump to a series of conclusions. Well, "Blink" is a book about those two seconds,...

One of the stories I tell in "Blink" is about the Emergency Room doctors at Cook County Hospital in Chicago. That's the big public hospital in Chicago, and a few years ago they changed the way they diagnosed heart attacks. They instructed their doctors to gather less information on their patients: they encouraged them to zero in on just a few critical pieces of information about patients suffering from chest pain--like blood pressure and the ECG--while ignoring everything else, like the patient's age and weight and medical history. And what happened? Cook County is now one of the best places in the United States at diagnosing chest pain.

Now to my problem. The more complex my job has become, I paradoxically seem to have less and less time to just think and analyze. I believe that I am this awesome decision maker like those Chicago doctors, except I don't have the year's of experience in IT that they have in medicine. I make a lot of snap decisions in the course of the day, often based on an email description of a situation, but more often from a phone conversation. I realize how limited those sources of information can be, but I just don't have time to stop and think, and occasionally I make a mistake that takes time and effort to back out of. Now comes this book that is telling me this is all just fine, you can bat a high percentage based on limited information if you concentrate on just the right facts. (Which facts? The RIGHT facts.) Great, rather than impose a little self discipline and carve out time during the day to perform careful thought and analysis, this leadership class is reinforcing my bad habits.

Maybe if I knock out the homework for this course the same way that I make decisions at work, I'll have time to blog after all.

Listening To Your Customers

In How the Mighty Fall, Jim Collins talks about how once great companies fail by failing to listen to their customers. In my own work, I am finding that listening to my customers is both rewarding and frustrating. What's great is that they clearly have a great need for the services I am responsible for delivering. The frustration is the impediments in delivering those services in the bureaucratic environment of the Federal government. Interestingly, I was talking to a former employee of GM, who worked for them in the IT area, and many of these same problems occur in the private sector in big businesses.

But listen to customers management must, or you can go the way of Domino's, once a fast rising company. This video is being cross posted from a political article on The Liberator Today, but the lessons are as applicable to management as to politics.

Performance Systems - NSPS

In 2009, Congress directed the Department of Defense (DoD) to dismantle one of Donald Rumsfeld's pet projects, the National Security Personnel System (NSPS), by October 2011. For those of you outside of the department, this system introduced pay for performance, much wider pay bands, and whole lot of extra paperwork for federal managers in the DoD. While the public employee unions may be happy, this was widely seen as payback from the Democratic Congress, as a federal manager, I am not that pleased with the system's demise.

I will be the first to admit that the system, as executed, with some fairly putrid Oracle based software, (sue me Oracle) was difficult to deal with. The amount of time spent mindlessly clicking through screens to accomplish the most basic tasks of entering and approving employee objectives was literally mind-numbing. Every six months, I calculated that I wasted a good four hours of non-value added click and wait time, and that's only because I figured out how to trick the system. (I used the back button on my browser to restore previous screen presentations, supposedly a big no-no. Actually it would error me out of the system occasionally, but was still worth it, time-wise.)

However, I really liked the systems use of performance goals for my employees. Before the start of each fiscal year, the leadership of my group would set goals that we at least attempted to align with the broader goals of our command. Then each supervisor was required to have at least three of the five objectives for employees match the group goals. The second level supervisor would review the goals to ensure compliance.

As the performance and fiscal year drew to a close, there were discussion about real problems that were preventing the achievement of some our goals. But I found that because the performance ratings of employees were tied to our group goals, there was much more focus. Now the system allows the supervisor to give "partial credit" if insurmountable obstacles got in the way of achievement. But everyone also knew that it was much easier to justify a higher rating to the performance review board if the goal was met or exceeded.

I have a talented and great team, but I found this system focused their efforts on what we all had agreed was really important for us to accomplish. We were not dogmatic either, sometimes in mid-year we changed goals as circumstances dictated. But this system helped us keep focus.

As we transition to a new system, I have the rare opportunity to have some influence on what shape it takes. (We are not going back to GS for those readers inside the federal government.) I will certainly push for a system that allows supervisors to set measurable goals for employees.

The Power of No

I was given "How the Mighty Fall" by Jim Collins for Christmas. I loved his previous work, "Good to Great," so I started reading even before all of the presents were unwrapped. I was struck by his discussion of the fall of Bank of America in the 1980s. Our preferred narrative for how large institutions fails is that they are overcome by complacency and overtaken by more nimble rivals. While that can certainly happen, that was not the case the BofA. In fact, one might argue that too much change was a factor in their demise.

In my own work, I am struck by how much change and process improvement is shoved our way, with no understanding of its applicability to our environment. We currently have the following improvement programs allegedly in progress simultaneously (I won't spell out the acronyms, I don't want to be sued for your depression): HPO, CMMI, ITIL, LSS, BSC, PMG (offshoot of PMBOK), CAO/IPT, Baldridge.

In fact none of these efforts have produced any measurable results. Maybe if we just subscribed to one, we might make improvements. What really works, however, is understanding the nature of your own business and intelligently improving it. But that is really the hard part. In a mid-size government corporation such as ours, understanding the whole of the company requires constant effort and monitoring by senior executives. By chasing change management to the nth exponent, they have no time left for understanding the nature of our work and performing the key customer relations role that only senior executives can perform. In fact, that is probably the key danger of so much change, it takes the focus off of the paying customer and that can kill the company.

This is why the word "no" is so powerful. Their are always reasons to divert management attention from its primary focus on customer results. "No" is the decision to turn away from all of these non-value added efforts by management. Deciding what one won't work on can be the most important component of success.

For an excellent summary of why I loathe such programs, see Jim Collins' article on the subject of corporate greatness here.