info-design

In the past year or so, I've become a fan of Fortune Magazine. I especially like some pieces that look at the people and story behind the headlines, such as the first-person article on the auto bailout. So, I was particularly taken by the "Battle Tested: from soldier to business leader" cover article recently, complete with full cover photo of one of the people in battle gear. As you would expect from the title, the article sets out to connect applicability of military training to the skills and abilities needed in business. One of the first questions that came to mind even goes ahead of this: how does military training work for the military? Most of those profiled in the article are West Point graduates, who upon graduation were Second Lieutenants and were in charge of a platoon. Think about that in business. A twenty-two year old whose first assignment is three to four teams, with each team having about a dozen members. I can't say that I've ever seen anything like that here in Silicon Valley, even during the bursts of growth and hiring. This is not the same as the recent graduate or even drop out who founds and grows a company. This is dropping someone into a fully developed organization and telling them to go run it. So, how does it work in the military? I can't speak from first-hand experience. But with my father in the military, I do have some understanding of the kinds of behaviors expected. I value and respect what I was taught and what was modeled for me. No question about that. But even without the direct experience, it's easy to see how something like Boot Camp contributes to making this structure work. But this doesn't get us an closer to the applicability of military training to business. It is this question that I was looking forward to in the Fortune article. More importantly, I was curious about how it works in the technology businesses that are here in Silicon Valley. Before going any further, let's address one thing: real life and death. Again, no question. Anyone who can live through those experiences, have qualities that serve well in business or anywhere in life. My father in the jungles. A cousin wounded by a sniper. A college buddy showing me massive torso scars and telling me about a year rehabbing from his injuries. While I remain a Fortune Magazine fan, I was disappointed because I did not get the take away I hoped for. The compelling connection between military experience and business leadership success was not made. Given those profiled, it does not establish the difference between this route to business and anyone from a highly regarded university, some of whom have gone through special programs such as the Pepsi Leadership Program cited. Some of those profiled said they have leadership skills, which is certainly true given that they started out with a staff of 40-50, which grew to upwards to 200 by the time they reached the rank 0f Captain. But is this intrinsically tied to a military grounding or could the same be said of anyone who again went to a good school and worked up to managing large teams? The roles tended to be in areas that might be more akin to the personnel and lines of work that you could see connected to the military. These included Walmart store management and drilling safety system construction. And they are doing graduate business work. In other words, they will have undergraduate degrees from a strong university and an MBA. This would seem to be a strong combination in its own right for business success. What about the Silicon Valley connection? There is one attempt, when a former officer now working for Google is asked about leading "eccentric" programmers. The response is that "in his experience Silicon Valley is dubious about any sort of leadership paradigm and skeptical of structure." He adds that those in the military doing interesting things have an "entrepreneurial in mindset." But again, this might be said about others elsewhere, like a dorm room. I wonder whether this was an assigned story, and the writer was giving it his best shot. But in the writing, he discovered that the proposition is no more than the person being successful in business and just happening to have a military background. Random Observation With this posting, I realized that I've spent more time thinking about government and the country than I have for a long time. I was riveted by the proceedings of the Health Care Reform voting. I attribute it to the country's current administration. That "Hope" thing is working, at least for me.

Labels: Management

A thought mashup from recent events: would Steve Jobs go for it on fourth down?

On the one side, Fortune Magazine names Jobs CEO of the Decade. On the other, New England Patriots coach Bill Belichik appears to have made a serious coaching error by going against conventional wisdom, resulting in a loss to the Indianapolis Colts.

Labels: Management, valley history

Businessweek Magazine reported this year's winners, and the top was Dan Roam whose book I wrote about here. All of the top three are the types of presentations I try for. It doesn't always happen. Sometimes we get locked into required formats, like those RYG (red, yellow, green) types of status reports on projects. But given a choice, this is the approach that works so much better. One of the things I appreciated about working at Cadence years back was the professional training on site. One class, which I think was actually required for a bunch of us, was on presentations. Even way back then, we were told to cool it on the words and, for crying out loud, don't stand there and read the darn things out loud for the audience. This image is one that I've used in talking about the state that software can get to: the Winchester Mystery Application. You've been there. The flagship product that got the company rolling has been showing its age. It got there by a path that might be likened to Sarah Winchester's quest with what is now the attraction in San Jose, CA. The result is a UI like the rooms in that mansion and the code needing an archeological dig to keep it running. Like the curse, gotta keep heaping stuff on the product or the company will die. Back to the presentation awards. Here they are, first through third, covering health care reform, an orphanage, and kidney health:

Labels: Management

As a manager, I have always committed to getting employee performance reviews right. In an industry where the "resources" walk out to the parking lot every day, it just makes sense for the business. For me, while there's no escaping evaluating the individuals, it's been more the respect owed to them and helping them get to where they want to go in their careers. An employee who feels good about things is the one who helps the business get to where it needs to go. Because I agonized over them, my hope is that anyone I wrote a review for will remember an evaluation that reflected a lot of care and thought. Yes, even the ones I had to write next to an ocean while on vacation. Where possible, I tried for these things:

• Participating with the company leadership to set high-level goals and values
• Working with my teams to set local supportive goals
• Working with the individual team members to set their personal and work goals

These were then a basis for the conversations around the reviews. There have been some oddball reviews, such as the time I took over for a manager who departed suddenly right before annual reviews were due. And there have been (gratefully) a small number where things got bumpy. But for the most part, this was the basic pattern I tried to emulate. But along the way, as I worked my way through different and changing companies and cultures, I started picking up a disconnect between my possibly idealized view and what was actually taking place around me. So, it was with some sad resignation that I first read through the Businessweek column by Stanford Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer, "Low Grades for Performance Reviews." In that piece, Pfeffer runs through a litany of flaws of humans, the process, and the inherent problem of engendering competition between individuals. But after I got over the initial reaction of being bummed out, I began to wonder whether some measures were possible to address what he raised. For example, why would we not be able to educate managers to the potential for biases, such as higher scores for those they hired into the organization or with whom they had a common demographic? There is some precedence in California, for example, where training on discrimination is required for managers. But when it occurred to me that this would take a certain kind of company culture and values to be able to pull this off, I got sort of bummed all over again. Given the current economy, priorities would seem to foster a workplace climate that likely has its sights elsewhere. On the other hand, though, it feels like the kind of company that would be able to rally around something like this might have a competitive advantage. Some time later, I saw a presentation by Dan Pink, whose A Whole New Mind I'd recently referenced: Pink contends that our motivation and reward system is set up for the mechanical, left-brain, linear worker. It works for if-then rewards with a clear set of rules. Pfeffer seemed to flirt with this insight with his suggestion to "make evaluation criteria more explicit and objective." The problem, according to Pink, is that this carrot and stick approach does not work for cognitive work (i.e., where the resources walk out to the parking lot every day). In fact, it dulls creativity and can do harm. Instead, what motivates these workers is not rewards, but autonomy, mastery, and purpose. In other words, the "Employee Performance Review" as commonly implemented will not improve performance. Pink goes to great lengths to establish that this isn't just his opinion, but the result of research findings in the area. So, if we know this, why do we stay with it? He asserts that it's not uncommon to have a "mismatch between what science knows and what business does." That's something going on at two levels: the knowledge not making its way into business and/or business not acting on it even if it knows. Given the difficulty of change, I'd even lean toward the problem being so difficult to overcome, that we just make do with what we have, no matter how fundamentally flawed. So maybe someone like Pfeffer will continue and help us get things to a better place. Until then, I am thankful that the core of what I've been doing over the years has some congruence with what Pink reports about motivation. Maybe at a minimum, we can adopt the spirit of the Hippocratic Oath of doing no harm. Hmm, shades of "Don't be evil." Another Google Ads Oops Speaking of which, I wonder of there's a name for these Google ads oops. I'd previously cited one that had an unfortunate juxtaposition, and had this one pop up when I was looking for the Pfeffer column:

Labels: Management

I thought I'd chewed enough for a while on Vision vs. Execution with my Vision vs. Idea post. Then I attended Dan Roamer's July BayCHI presentation on visual thinking and Back of the Napkin. I'd started the book a while back, but life got in the way. So, on the flight to Maui (yeah, I know), I finished reading it.

Out over the Pacific I hit Roam's SQVID and had Vision and Execution staring out of the page at me:

Roam offers SQVID as a little mnemonic for "idea focusing or audience focusing."

On the "idea focusing," going up and down the poles and across SQVID forces us to look at an idea from different points particularly those that are not our usual angles. It's something like Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind in this regard. Roam uses SQVID on the "audience focusing" to guide the content and approach in the idea's presentation.

So many pertinent points are covered in the discussion of the Vision and Execution poles. First is a connection with what I'd suggested, Vision vs. Ideas. The exercise is to take that beginning idea and grow it, flesh it out. In this context, the Vision-Execution is only one exercise station. But the point remains: okay, you had an idea, but you need to do more.

The next point is that they're connected, it's not one or the other. Also, understanding the relationship can help in the messaging, in getting people to take action. On tuning the presentation for the audience, Roam describes it well:

Vision: "we know where we're going"

Execution: "we know exactly how we're going to get there"

Sometimes the Vision is what's needed, at others the Execution. What I suggested was the "how to get there" needs to be informed by "where we're going."

Beyond this, the book is worth a read. And it's really okay material for that trip to Maui.

Labels: Management

A recent Sarah Lacy post on TechCrunch treated the question "Is Execution More Important than Vision?" One response was from Dave Morin, asking for a conversation on the subject, which is where I happened on it.

There were some quick posts to the conversation, where the trend seemed to be in favor of Execution. One of those posting in response to Morin, Ben Bloch, had even posted a few days ahead of the Lacy post. His take captured the gist of the other comments: "the idea itself is essentially worthless without quality execution and perseverance."

I took part in the "conversation" by trying to jam into tweet space the relationship among idea, vision, and execution. I was going to leave it at that. But like that song you can't get out of your head, I found myself continuing to stew on it.

I found someone else who looks for the connectedness in things in Bob Warfield who responded to the Lacy posting in "Vision is Strategy. Execution is Tactics" with

"What always bugs me about this whole argument is that it again falls into the very Western mindset that insists there must be black or white and no gray. Only one can win, and we will simply choose to see all gray as whichever color we want to be the winner."

One of the things that resonates with me from Warfield's piece--and connects to my first response that Vision is bigger than just an idea--is his view of Vision is Strategy. That is, to frame this up to begin with , it's not Ideas vs. Execution, but really, Vision vs. Ideas.

I'm as guilty as anyone of having ideas and seeing something later that looks connected. At one company a dozen years back, I tried to get some momentum behind making satellite terrain and imagery mapping and visualization available to the public. Another time, I ran into "Why would anyone want to do that on a phone?" And there was getting rebuffed about moving to information delivery on Mosaic with "We won't use shareware."

In each case, we had all the technical ability, but the vision-- the ability flesh out how to make it so required more time, ability, and/or commitment than I/we had. I'd be kidding myself if I thought otherwise. And yes, I'd put in there the articulation of the business case. In this context, by the time you get to Execution, or as Warfield says, Tactics, it is Vision shaping things for you:

Give a good Executor a Vision from somewhere, even borrowed, and they will get it done. But once they’ve taken the hill, they will have no idea what hill to take next. Situate their hill in the middle of a whole mountain range of opportunity, and it’s the worst thing they can encounter.

I liked this. As an Executor, I've always done best with having a vision to guide me on what to do, particularly when we've come up against the need to make adjustments. It's very much like pulling out a map to check bearings. It also helped to be part of filling out the vision. If Vision can be said to be the "where," then Execution might be the "what," complemented by Culture as the "how," which I'd touched on in an earlier post.

How's that for carrying on the conversation?

Labels: Management

In a Mercury News article last week about the bidding war between NetApp and EMC for Data Domain, NetApp CMO Jay Kidd called out the better "cultural compatibility" between his company and Data Domain. In a world where "shareholder value" trumps pretty much everything, it was good to see someone calling out culture as a value. I've worked with Jay, so I took the perspective to be more than marketing positioning. I shared with him that I'd also recently seen the influence of cultural differences, and he pointed out that the Wall Street Journal had picked up the topic today.

It might be one of those Venus and Mars differences. As evidenced in the Comments section on the WSJ article, the shareholder value set (Mars) doesn't really get this culture (Venus) stuff, despite language that on the surface says it gets it. The challenge is that culture doesn't readily lend itself to being rendered into numbers to show a better deal. Instead, it manifests itself as the sum of things like the decisions people make, how they go about doing their work, how the leaders lead, and what and who gets rewarded. These play out in terms of how the individuals and teams perform and, ultimately, the company. Of course, if EMC acquiring Data Domain is a defensive move as Jay contends, then culture and performance really don't matter.

© Arthur Ignacio Consulting 2009

Labels: Management, technology