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The Price Of Folly August 12, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.
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8 comments

One of my favorite quotes is from Herbert Spencer:

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of their folly is to fill the world with fools.

Spencer was a Victorian-era English philosopher who focused much of his thought on evolution at a higher, social level.  He coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” and was an very well-known thinker in his day.  It is safe to say that he would not suffer fools gladly, regardless of how they were produced.

Spencer’s quote was directed at some of the prevailing political ideas of his time and was intended to shape broad public opinion.  Regardless of how you define “folly” (or “fool,” for that matter), his quote is a cautionary one: do not protect people from their mistakes, thus preventing them from learning from them.

His advice is just as important in the day-to-day business world that we all manage.  Mistakes happen all the time, caused by hundreds of different reasons, let alone folly.  How we handle them not only says a lot about our leadership skills, but also dictates how our organization succeeds.

With the current emphasis on soft skills, many leaders try to soften the impact of a mistake.  Even when people are upset, we try to soothe them and diminish the impact of the error.  Our goal is noble, and we may make them feel better, but we also miss an opportunity for someone to really absorb the impact of their error.  Shielding a person from the impact of their mistake can be disastrous, leading them to believe that mistakes, although unpleasant, aren’t all that bad.

The opposite kind of leader is just as bad.  Ranting and raving may make you feel better, but you are not helping the person who made the mistake.  While Spencer may be happy that you have certainly not shielded them, it isn’t clear that you have helped them either.

There is a middle ground, of course, but it can be difficult to achieve.  I do believe that people need to understand the impact of their error.  Tiny errors at one level can cascade to become disasters later, and people need to come to terms with the magnitude of their mistakes.  I will often explain to a person all the potential issues their error could lead to, not to make them feel bad (they should anyway) but so that they understand the real price that others may pay for their lapse.

But you cannot stop there.  At that point, you must then work to find ways to keep that mistake from happening again.  The only bad mistake is the one you do not learn from, and the only unforgivable mistake is the one that keeps happening over and over.  As you analyze why a problem occurred, people may begin the process upset and remorseful, but they should emerge with a plan and a positive approach to make things better going forward.

You should apply this to yourself as well.  When you know you’ve screwed up, you should feel terrible about it.  But instead of wallowing in the remorse, figure out ways to keep it from happening again and move forward.

People don’t fail because they make mistakes.  People fail because they don’t learn from their mistakes.

My Dear Aunt Sally August 7, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Random Musings.
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5 comments

The recent Cash For Clunkers program neatly demonstrates a grave problem facing this country.  No, not the auto industry, global warming, or appropriate levels of government intervention in free markets.  I’m talking about something much more important: simple arithmetic.

Cash For Clunkers set aside a billion dollars to buy back certain vehicles in trade for newer, more efficient ones.  Each trade-in would qualify for either $3,500 or $4,500 in credit, depending on the model.  The program began in late July and was expected to run through November.  It lasted all of a week before running out of funds.  How could that happen?

Easy.  No one can do math in their heads anymore.

Let’s run the numbers. To make things simple, say each trade-in gets $4,000 from the fund.  With a billion dollars available, that allows for 250,000 trade-ins.  There are 23,000 car dealers in the US, each anxious to sell as many cars as possible.  That’s an average of 11 cars for each dealer.  Now ask yourself, how long would it take for each car dealer in the US to sell 11 cars that offer an additional $4,000 discount?

If you guessed “four months,” you have a potential career in Congress.  If you guessed “four days,” you are demonstrating a good grasp of basic market analysis.  In fact, some dealerships sold more than 11 cars in just one day; the only thing that slowed their pace was that the government web site for registering all these sales collapsed under the load, clearly designed with a “four month” mind set.

I’m not presenting this to start a political discussion. I’m here to lament that the average person can no longer solve this problem in their head. (Some people cannot solve it with pencil and paper, either.)

If you seek to run a successful business, or an organization within a business, you’ll need to make many rapid decisions based on numerical analysis.  If you cannot run those numbers in your head, you will not make good decisions.  Pricing, licensing, system loads, capacity planning, leasing terms, scheduling, manpower loading, you name it: quick, accurate math skills are the cornerstone of effective management.

I have sat in many presentations where outlandish claims were made without a murmur of dissent by those attending.  Running the numbers in my head allowed me to question the claim and get a better answer.  We see advertisements every day that cannot stand the scrutiny of simple math, yet many people take them as verbatim truth.  Why won’t people do the math?

In many cases, doing the math leads you to a result that strains your credulity.  In the Cash For Clunkers analysis, you’re left wondering if it would take four months to sell eleven cars.  More typically, you may instead be looking at outrageous monthly lease payments, or unrealistic average network latency, or some other metric that makes no sense.  But if you didn’t do the math, you’d never get to the simple number that makes you say “Wait a minute!”

A big part of leadership is knowing when to say “Wait a minute!” Quick arithmetic skills can play a big part in honing that skill.  Almost all of us can do simple arithmetic, but how many of us use those skills every day to increase our odds of success?

Passion Or Vocation? August 5, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership, Technology.
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8 comments

In a recent issue of Technology & Invention magazine, Mara Vatz wrote about discovering her grandfather’s engineering textbooks from the 1930s.  Herself a recent engineering graduate, she was struck by the difference between those old books and those she recently used.  Her grandfather’s books were filled with the passion of engineering, of being consumed with the excitement of building and creating, of bending the natural world to the will of man for the betterment of society.

Her books, in contrast, were dry and methodical.  They taught engineering as a sequence of steps that could be applied to solve a problem.  They presented engineering as a vocation, just a job, just some rote sequence of steps far removed from the real world of problems to be solved.  The contrast made her sad, longing for a time when her chosen profession seemed more alive to its practitioners.

I have the same worry for the world of IT.  At the risk of cementing my geezer status, I learned computing in a time when everyone wrote assembly code.  I punched cards and booted machines by toggling switches on the front panel.  I learned how to build computers from the transistors up, wire-wrapping individual logic gates to decode address lines.  It was fascinating, consuming, and instilled a passion for technology that I carry with me even today.

Are we instilling the same passion today?  Or has computing become a vocation, a series of steps that you use to solve the problem at hand?  I am certainly not advocating a return to assembly code, but I want to make sure that our newest computing professionals have that same gleam in their eye as I did so many years ago.  The layers of abstraction we’ve built in our systems enable us to create systems that were inconceivable back then, but those same layers remove us from the nuts and bolts of computing.  As those nuts and bolts fade away, our true understanding of computers fades.

Some of today’s IT people have that passion.  You can see it in your best people, the ones who dig in and never let go of a issue, who wake up at 3 AM with the answer to a problem, who run into the office with the next great idea.  But does everyone have that passion?  And if they don’t, should they?

I want everyone to have that passion.  Passion is infectious, and passionate people in IT create passionate people outside of IT.  If people didn’t find that passion in school, we need to pass it to them ourselves.

Much is made of leadership and mentoring, teaching important skills to our teams.  Beyond leadership skills, we need to convey the passion of our field to our people.  We have to constantly demonstrate our love of this stuff, the wonder of a problem solved, the satisfaction of a user helped.  If we aren’t going to get excited about a new tool, and our people don’t get excited, how will we engage our users?

My passion is for computing, of course, but this applies to every discipline.  Do you have a true passion for what you do?  Do you demonstrate it every day?  Do you infect your people with that passion and enable them to carry it to others?  Or is your job just a vocation? If so, I’ll bet your people feel exactly the same way.

One Version Of The Truth August 3, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.
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3 comments

In the world of enterprise architecture, there is a practice called Master Data Management.  In short, MDM involves explicitly defining and maintaining precisely how your data is created, where it is kept, and when it is destroyed.  An important component of MDM is the concept of “one version of the truth:” that exactly one official instance of every data element in your company exists in one place, and that all other uses of that data are copies derived from that original “truth.”

IT folks tend to espouse MDM, along with one version of the truth, because it makes management of the data much easier.  Most companies do a less-than-adequate job of MDM, which makes it easy to poke holes in existing systems and call for review of existing  processes. IT often swoops into an organization, denounces the poor MDM practices it finds, and offers to “help.” If only we would apply the same standards to ourselves.

Compared to the rest of the company, IT doesn’t generate a lot of business data.  But we do produce a lot of information, in the form of policies, procedures, and end-user documentation.  We seem to have endless rules for everything, and an opinion on how to manage and use any device with moving electrons.  Do we do a good job in managing our information?

Short answer: usually not.  Our policies are captured in a variety of ways and stored in all sorts of places.  Documentation runs the gamut from hard-copy documents stored in a cabinet to PDFs strewn about in online repositories.  We’ve migrated across multiple systems throughout the years, leaving a trail of conflicting and overlapping paperwork behind.  How could anyone make sense of our world?

Even worse, we don’t consistently understand our policies so that we can articulate them to our customers.  When someone speaks to someone in your IT shop and asks a question, will they get the same answer from everyone?  If an IT employee doesn’t know the answer to a question, do they know which person that should be able to help?

Beyond operational data and policies, does everyone on your IT staff understand your strategic vision?  Can they articulate it at a high level and relate it to their immediate responsibilities?  Do they know why certain projects are being pursued and others are not? Can they explain how your top-level IT drivers relate to the business needs of the company?

All of these elements are part of the “data” that must be managed consistently for an IT group to be effective.  Missing or inconsistent documents and policies confuse and frustrate users.  Getting inconsistent or incorrect answers from your staff will drive people crazy.  And misunderstood strategies will waste time and resources as you constantly educate and align your staff.

What’s the answer? The same one we give to others outside of IT: discipline, focus, and constant communication.  We have to build the discipline to capture and manage our documents correctly and efficiently. But as IT leaders, we must constantly communicate our vision, its relation to our plans, and its impact on our company.  We must verify that the organization’s managers understand and communicate that vision in the same fashion, so that it gets heard at every level.

Master data management is hard, and that’s true for IT shops as well.  Before we start preaching to the rest of the company, we need to make sure that our one version of the truth is being managed well first.

Not Now. Or Ever. July 31, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Random Musings.
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7 comments

I have been known to rant a bit on what I perceive to be annoying sales practices.  Just when you think you’ve seen it all, someone comes up with yet another way to completely irritate a potential customer.  The latest trick is the “presumptive appointment.”

With the universal adoption of calendaring systems, most everyone has grown accustomed to receiving appointment invitations via email.  While such appointments are very common within an organization, they’ve generally not expanded beyond organizations.  Recently, however, people have been sending more invitations to people outside of their email domain, which is generally useful and makes scheduling a meeting a little easier.

That’s where the annoying salespeople come in.  Lately I’ve gotten meeting requests from salespeople for meetings I did not agree to attend.  In the body of the message, they do not ask for my time; rather, they ask me to supply a different time if their proposed time is not convenient.  The real question, whether I want to meet with them, is ignored.

This is like someone showing up at your house, unannounced, looking for dinner.  When you awkwardly try to refuse their request, they innocently ask, “Oh, is this not a good time to have dinner?  When would be better for you?” Well, how about “never?”

A responsible salesperson goes about this in a different way. After a productive introductory conversation, he or she might ask if a follow-up meeting is in order.  If I agree, we then compare calendars and find a mutually convenient time.  To close out that negotiation, I’ll ask them to send a meeting request to confirm the appointment.  The calendar entry represents the result of our negotiation, not the starting point.

I am constantly amazed at how rude a small subset of salespeople can be.  All the hardworking, polite salespeople that go about things in the right way should beat these ignorant few with a stick. Are there large groups of people that accept these invitations without prior discussion?  If so, stop!  Like the insane people that respond to spam email, you are only encouraging more bad behavior.  We’re all suffering as a result.