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The Simultac Fonton June 15, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.
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9 comments

Early in my career, I had the good fortune to work in a pure R&D group.  Our goal to research and develop large, scalable multiprocessors.  Some members of the group worked on more conventional shared-memory systems, and others focused on a very different kind of computer known as a dataflow machine.

One of the senior researchers had been wrestling with dataflow architecture for years.  One night, in a dream, he had a “eureka moment” in which the key to unlocking the secret of dataflow computing was revealed.  He woke up, grabbed a pad on the nightstand, and scribbled down the answer.  He then fell back asleep, presumably a very contented man.

When he arose the next morning, he reached for the pad.  On it, he had written

Simultac Fonton

and nothing else.

The frustration!  The agony!  He knew he had the answer.  He had seen it in his dream!  But what made sense in his dream made no sense the next day, and the cryptic “Simultac Fonton” was no help.

In the ensuing years, he has continued his efforts to find the elusive Simultac Fonton.  Presumably it exists, or he will create it. I’ll leave it to the more curious readers to see if such a thing has ever existed.

For those of us who were present when the Simultac Fonton was “discovered,” it represents that secret element that we all seek, the magic key to our success. In that sense, we all have a Simultac Fonton, whether we know it or not.  To be successful, we must find it.

For the majority of  people, finding the Simultac Fonton is not the problem: they don’t even know what they want to accomplish!  It is difficult to find the key to your personal when you have not even clarified your metric for success.  Do you want to be a great leader?  A great father? A successful entrepreneur? A compelling public speaker? A respected teacher?  Our goals are as unique as we each are, but we must spend some serious time understanding ourselves and defining our goals.

With a goal in mind, we can then seek the corresponding Simultac Fonton. This is even harder.  For dataflow computers, the Simultac Fonton is most likely tangible, an ingenious bit of hardware or an algorithm that solves the problem. For most of our other goals, the Simultac Fonton is intangible: a personal flaw, or a blind spot, or a missing skill that we may never know we are lacking.

You may never be a great leader because you cannot convey your vision.  You may never be a great father because you cannot let go of your own needs.  You may never be a great entrepreneur because you cannot tolerate risk. For every goal, there may be a crucial element, the Simultac Fonton, that you cannot envision. If you cannot see it, you cannot seek it.

How do we see it? I think we need to turn to others and sincerely request their unvarnished feedback.  We need to develop a small circle of truly trusted advisors that will point out those flaws and describe the Simultac Fonton for us.  In return, we need to help others understand their Simultac Fontons. Only then can we each find our Fontons and achieve our goals.

Do you have a goal? Do you understand your Simultac Fonton? Are you close to finding it?  Will you succeed?

Scheduling Formal Fun June 12, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.
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1 comment so far

When I inherited my current team, they had gone through an exercise in self-management wherein they formed various committees to address and improve different aspects of their work life.  These teams looked into things like meeting etiquette, time management, and internal training.  Many of these teams identified a problem, solved it, and eventually disbanded.  But one team, the most important one, has lasted for years.  That team is the Fun Committee.

All of our people work hard, especially in these times of tight budgets.  Long hours, tough projects, and high expectations put our people under stress that can tear a team apart.  The best way to alleviate that stress is to blow off some steam and have some fun with your coworkers.  My group thinks that this is so important that it cannot be left to chance.  Thus the Fun Committee was born, to make sure we have fun on a regular basis.

It may seem odd to formally schedule something that should happen spontaneously.  But if you don’t plan to have fun, you rarely will.  We get so caught up in our jobs that we won’t take time to relax a bit and enjoy each other’s company.

The events planned by the Fun Committee are not elaborate.  They provide a collective birthday cake each month, which takes all of thirty minutes.  There is typically an annual Halloween costume contest in the fall, and a Strawberry Festival each spring.  There are occasional unannounced events, drawing everyone to the break room for some small treat on the spur of the moment.

Even though these events are small, they bring our whole group together for a specifically non-business event.  We socialize a bit, celebrate the moment as needed, and return to our work a bit more energized.  We’ve come to expect these events, and they are a positive component of our team culture.

Most teams enjoy getting together and having these moments, but many groups never seem to make them happen.  Without a formal approach to scheduling fun, time slips away and the events never occur.  People regret not doing more with their group, but rarely act to change things.

I didn’t create the Fun Committee, but I have certainly come to appreciate what they do and I’d hate to see the Fun Committee disband.  That’s the best part: the committee is self-sustaining.  People stay on for a period of time and then rotate off, to be replaced by others.  The committee manages this process, and I’ve never been called on to keep the team alive.  It is truly on its own, sustained by the common desire to keep that social bond strong in the group.

As leaders, team morale is as much our responsibility as anything else.  How do you build and maintain morale in your group?  Do you have a Fun Committee?  Do you need one?

Solutions Without Technology May 27, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership, Technology.
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1 comment so far

Of the many aphorisms that I enjoy using, one of my favorites is

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

I pull this one out when someone is using some system in an inappropriate way.  People get so comfortable with their favorite tools, they use them for everything even when a better solution is readily available.

This is an easy accusation for an IT person to make.  Most software systems are so complicated that it is easier for a user to twist an existing system into an unusual solution than it is to learn some completely arcane new system.  People just want to solve problems and get on with their jobs and lives.  I know this is hard to believe, but they don’t look forward to exploring and mastering that latest version of some new desktop application.

Those of us in IT would do well to listen to our own advice.

How many times, when asked to help solve some problem, do we immediately reach for a computer?  Typically, the answer is “all of the time.”  We’re in IT; we know how to make computers do interesting things; therefore every problem can be solved with some technology-based solution.

Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Many problems do not exist for want of a technology solution.  In fact, many of the day-to-day business problems we encounter are rooted in process, flow, and data collection.  While you can certainly throw software at all of those areas, you can also fix a lot of issues by talking to people, understanding their real needs, and proposing ways to change things in a non-technical way.

Within IT, we have developed a broad range of skills that are not rooted in technology.  Process analysis, data management, project management, user interface design, audit and compliance, risk management: the list is long.  Why, then, when someone is gracious enough to give us the opportunity to help, do we reach for the hardware?  We perpetuate the perception that we are nothing more than geeks, when if fact we have so much more to offer.

I’ve been on projects where the real solution was to have a user interface designer rework a paper form layout.  I’ve seen errant projects saved by sharing good project management skills.  I’ve seen business processes reworked by applying disaster recovery discipline.  In all of these cases, not a single line of code was written in pursuit of a solution.  Instead, IT people spent time listening, sharing, and collaborating to help users do their jobs more effectively.

People in IT chafe at being known solely for their technical expertise, yet we fall into our old habits when confronted with a problem.  We need to follow our own advice, set down the hammer of technology, and look for effective non-technical solutions to many of the problems we’re asked to solve.  We’ll grow in our ability to be of service, and we’ll begin to build a better reputation with our end users.

What Can You Do? May 20, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Random Musings.
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4 comments

I enjoy collecting and sharing inspirational quotes.  I’ve arranged a few of my favorites on the Quotes page of this blog in the hope that others may garner similar inspiration from them.  I know that there are thousands of these collections, far larger and more comprehensive than mine.  Mine are, well, mine; they come from people that I admire for various reasons.

The newest addition to my collection comes from a relative unknown, Nicholas Winton:

I just saw what was going on and did what I could to help.

What did Nicholas do?  In the waning days of 1939, he saw what was happening to the Jews in Czechoslovakia.  He went to Prague, opened an office, and arranged to have 669 Jewish children sponsored and moved to Great Britain.  An additional trainload of 250 children was to have left on September 3, 1939, but war was declared and the train was canceled.  Those children were killed by the invading Germans.

Nicholas Winton turned 100 yesterday, on May 19, 2009.  He is inordinately modest (he never even told his wife what he had done), and I certainly have not done his story justice.  You can learn more about him here and here, and a 2002 movie tells his story as well.

It would be impossible to catalog the downstream good that Winton’s actions caused.  How many subsequent good acts were undertaken by those he saved?  And by their children, and in turn their children? How many people have benefited by some action of those saved by Winton, but have no idea that they could trace that act back to one man, doing what he could to help, in 1939?

Few of us, regrettably, will have the impact of Winton.  But all of us can have some impact, in some way, every day.  No act of good, no matter how small, is wasted.  Most importantly, we can never know the true measure of any act of good.  What seems small to us may be huge to someone else.

There is an apocryphal tale of a small boy walking on a beach covered with starfish washed up by the tide.  As he walks, he picks up starfish and throws them back into the water.  His father asks him “Why throw them back? You can’t save all the starfish.  What difference does it make?”  The boy picks up another starfish, throws it, and says “It made a difference to him.”

Today, in honor of Nicholas Winton, make a difference to someone.  In each situation you encounter, ask yourself two simple questions:

What is going on?

What can I do to help?

Imagine a world where we all did that every day.  Now stop imagining and go do it!

Absolute Guy In A Relative World May 18, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.
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1 comment so far

I like absolutes. Yes or no. Black or white. Right or wrong. No room for debate or equivocating; the answer is patently obvious to all concerned.

This is why computing is so appealing to me.  Strip away all the layers of abstraction, and computing is about getting a sequence of 1s and 0s in the right order.  If you get the right order, it’s correct.  Drop or flip a bit, and it’s not.  You may think you’re reading this blog; in fact, you are viewing an abstract representation of several billion bits arranged to appear as text on your screen.  If even one bit were wrong, these words would not be correct.  Simple: right or wrong.

Leadership is rarely about such absolutes.  When dealing with people and plans, there are a million shades of gray that must be weighed and blended to reach decisions.  From strategic planning to tactical choices, we have to function within a spectrum of relative values that are open to interpretation.

In many cases, relative judgments make life easier.  We often talk about being “good enough,” about applying the 80/20 rule, about knowing when to quit and move on to the next project.  In these cases, there is often a law of diminishing returns that make achieving an absolute result more expensive than the benefit derived.  Knowing when to stop is an important aspect of leadership, too.

With so much of our world based on a relative scale, it can be tempting to let everything shift to a relative scale.  I think it’s important to remember that some things are never relative.  Things like ethics, morals, trust, integrity, and reputation should never be viewed on a relative scale.  We should hold ourselves to absolute standards and never relax in our desire to achieve an absolute result in those areas.  Note that this doesn’t mean that we won’t have lapses, but those lapses can take a long time to overcome.  A tarnished reputation may take years to be restored, but the standard of a “good reputation” should not change; we simply need to work harder to achieve that standard.

I also have certain things, related to my IT background, that I always judge on an absolute scale. Data integrity is not a relative issue for me.  Data is either right or wrong, pure or corrupt.  Systems are either up or down, available or not.  Software features either work, or they don’t.  I tend to drive my team crazy with this stuff, but that doesn’t deter me from getting on my soapbox every now and again.

I find that I get a lot of reactions when I express this view.  Some people, it seems, will gauge almost anything on a relative scale.  There seems to be a general aversion to absolute anything. What do you hold to an absolute scale?  What do you shift to relative judgment?  Does it matter?