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Posts Tagged ‘management’

The gossip factor

Posted in books, tagged , , , , , , on 08/04/2015| Leave a Comment »

Here’s a quote from Sherard Cowper-Coles’ memoir Ever the diplomat: confessions of a Foreign Office mandarin on the immediate aftermath of the case of Michael Bettany (a digruntled MI5 counter-intelligence officer who in 1983 made a ham-fisted attempt to get himself recruited by the KGB by delivering confidential documents to the letter box of the chief of the KGB’s London station):

The Prime Minister decided something had to be done about MI5, and a new, external, director general was appointed, in the shape of Sir Antony Duff, a senior Foreign Office official with a distinguished earlier career in the Royal Navy. […] I asked Duff what he thought had been the main problem with MI5. ‘The gossip factor,’ he replied at once. He explained that MI5 officers had been so security-conscious that they had never gossiped to or about each other, thus failed to detect the loneliness and unhappiness that had led Bettaney to go off the rails […] In Duff’s view, successful organisations needed an element of gossip, as a means of what would now be called team-building and as a safety valve.

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Specific, measurable

Posted in theory, tagged , , , on 14/07/2014| 3 Comments »

If you’ve ever worked for a company with an officious HR department, you will probably have been told of the importance of setting yourself SMART objectives.

SMART, in this context, is an acronym. It would have to be, really, wouldn’t it? I mean, if you found yourself in an organization where this sort of thing is taken with extreme seriousness then the genuinely smart thing would probably be to get out of there. As an acronym SMART can stand (if you go by Wikipedia and some simple arithmetic) for over three thousand combinations of words. However, we only need to concern ourselves with the most commonly given first two words: “specific” and “measurable”.

Before going any further I should probably admit that personally I’ve never got on well with things of this sort: objective setting and so forth. They may sometimes be helpful, perhaps as catalysts for useful conversations, and even when they’re not I can accept them as harmless nonsense. My hunch, however, is that they are most useful for very ambitious people, whereas I’m more motivated by curiosity than thoughts of promotion. This is hardly an unusual attitude in the software industry, so it generally hasn’t caused me any trouble. This is why I feel free to do things like discussing the Dunning-Kruger effect when asked to rate my own abilities or, as I will be doing here, telling the story of BP and the balanced scorecard.
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The Moment of Clarity

Posted in books, theory, tagged , , , , on 03/04/2014| Leave a Comment »

the_moment_of_clarity

I have a fondness for connections that bridge seemingly disparate worlds. Examples? Well, early on in my programming career I read Michel Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception in a bid to figure out how developer-written documentation might work better. I was also intrigued by the inventor of the Pomodoro technique®, a personal productivity system, claiming inspiration from Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method. I’ve even, on occasion, tried to get “personal development” types interested in stylistic similarities between language used in certain forms of hypnotherapy and the dramatic works of Samuel Beckett.

In a similar vein, I’ve been intrigued by Hubert Dreyfus as a cross-world interloper. Dreyfus, an academic philosopher, had a surprise hit on iTunes with podcasts of his lectures (particularly popular with long-distance truck drivers, it seems). He has an odd double reputation in the world of computing. To some he is a hate figure on account of his critique, first made when he was at MIT in the 1960s, of rule-based Artificial Intelligence. This came from an insistence of the primacy of skilled behaviour over abstract cognition. His subsequent investigations into the phenomenon of skill acquisition subsequently gave him his other reputation: the “Dreyfus Model” is now used in parts of the industry for professional development. I’m sure there are people who don’t realize that it’s the same Dreyfus in both cases.

All of which leads me, in a rather meandering way, to another unexpected connection: business consultants who read Heidegger, specifically Christian Madsbjerg and Mikkel B. Rasmussen of ReD Associates who’s book The Moment of Clarity: Using the human sciences to solve your toughest business problems was recently been published by Harvard Business Review. In it, they promote ideas and methods from anthropology and sociology as a way for businesses to do better by “getting people right”. They also draw on the so-called “continental” tradition in modern philosophy, centred on Martin Heidegger. Foucault, Gadamer and Dreyfus all get their mentions. (Nothing on Beckett: you can’t have everything…)
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One last push

Posted in books, tagged , , , , , on 24/08/2013| 2 Comments »

I’m not really sure why I read books about management theory. With the thought that forewarned is forearmed, I suppose. Anyway, here’s an interesting quote from Good Strategy / Bad Strategy: The difference and why it matters by Richard Rumelt (pp. 47-8):

The philosophy of the age [early 20th century], most fervently adopted by the French, was that willpower, spirit, morale, élan, and aggressiveness were the keys to success. For three years, generals flung highly motivated men at fortified machine-gun emplacements, only to see tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands, shredded to mincemeat to gain a mile of useless ground.

[…]

At the Somme and Passchendaele, Haig led an entire generation of British and Dominion youths to their deaths—as Joseph Joffre did for the French at Somme, and Erich von Falkenheyn did for the Germans at Verdun.

In Europe, motivational speakers are not the staple of the management lecture circuit that they are in the United States, where the doctrine of leadership as motivation is alive and well. Here, for example, is H. Ross Perot: “Most people give up when they’re just about to achieve success. They quit on the one-yard line. They give up at the last minute of the game, one foot from the winning touchdown.”

Hearing this, many American nod in agreement. Many Europeans, by contrast, hear the echo of the “one last push” at Passchendaele.

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Richard Berry: inspiring a team mindset

Posted in out and about, tagged , , , , , on 16/07/2013| Leave a Comment »

Some years ago, at an “all hands” meeting at a company where I worked, the head of the company enthused at length about Jack Welch’s famous ruthlessness. At the time I said to various people that if I wanted to work for General Electric then I knew where to find them. I wasn’t joking: GE have an office in easy walking distance of my house. However, I never set foot in there until last night, when I attended a talk by Richard Berry—part of their series of “agile talks”.

The talk was about management and leadership, and the differences in management style (command-and-control vs. facilitation) and the importance of different personality types in how teams work. Management theory, then. (And yes, there were flip-charts, and a 2×2 matrix, and book recommendations at the end.)

I’ve seen some disappointment expressed about the content of the talk. Surely this is all rather old hat: no-one now believes that command-and-control is a sensible way to organize a software development team. I’d have two responses to that, the first of which is that overt command-and-control may be rare but that the common alternative—insisting that people “take ownership” without giving them any meaningful control isn’t really the same thing as facilitation.

My other response would be that even if the broad outline of Richard’s talk didn’t hold any surprises, it’s possible to do this sort of thing badly or well, and Richard did it well. The last presentation I saw that covered this rough area was given by some ex-marketing guy who seemed to speak largely in clichés taken from trashy pop psychology books (“don’t sweat the small stuff”, “change is the only constant”, etc.). Regardless of the big picture being peddled, there were telling little details in Richard’s talk that, for me, showed that he knew what he was talking about. This wasn’t an occasion for buzzword bingo.
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Abusive language

Posted in theory, word ways, tagged , , , , , , on 13/06/2013| 1 Comment »

One criticism of contemporary life is the tendency to treat everything, and everyone, as a resource to be optimized and exploited. This was part of the idea behind Ian Bogost’s satire on Zynga-style social games, Cow Clicker:

In social games, friends aren’t really friends; they are mere resources. And not just resources for the player, but also for the game developer, who relies on insipid, “viral” aspects of a design to make a system replicate.

Now, it’s one thing to treat someone like a resource, but it’s something else to use that sort of language about someone with their knowledge, even to their face. Yet it happens. It really is quite bizarre.
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The Languages of Pao

Posted in books, tagged , , , on 31/05/2013| 2 Comments »

I intermittently attend a “science and literature” reading group. The last thing I read for the group was “The Languages of Pao”, by Jack Vance. Actually, we only read the first nine chapters.

I’m not really much of a science fiction fan—I’m not much of a novel-reader in general—and to start with the book was a bit of a grind. But once the story got going I found it quite intriguing: perhaps it had some sort of personal resonance.
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Feedback

Posted in word ways, tagged , , on 26/04/2013| Leave a Comment »

Complaining about corporate jargon is almost too easy to be worth the effort. But I did want to have a little whinge about my own pet peeve: the misuse of the terms “positive feedback” and “negative feedback”.
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Philosophy and management

Posted in theory, tagged , , , on 23/01/2010| Leave a Comment »

Matthew Stewart, The Management Myth:

The recognition that management theory is a sadly neglected subdiscipline of philosophy began with an experience of déjà vu. As I plowed through my shelfload of bad management books, I beheld a discipline that consists mainly of unverifiable propositions and cryptic anecdotes, is rarely if ever held accountable, and produces an inordinate number of catastrophically bad writers. It was all too familiar. There are, however, at least two crucial differences between philosophers and their wayward cousins. The first and most important is that philosophers are much better at knowing what they don’t know. The second is money. In a sense, management theory is what happens to philosophers when you pay them too much.

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