Management Thoughts

The three item rule

Now at The three item rule

Listen

One of my primary suggestions for everyone, and not just managers, is to listen first and to listen carefully for what is really being said. Doing so significantly improves communication for a number of reasons; first, most "communication" is everyone talking and no one listening. Needless to say this is inefficient and ineffective. It's even common to see arguments where people are violently agreeing but aren't listening well enough to realize it.

Starting off with everyone listening carefully goes a long way toward insuring that people are at least discussing the issues of disagreement. This keeps the discussion on topic and makes it possible to then determine how to resolve those issues of disagreement. It also shows respect to those you are discussing an issue with, that you first ask them to lay out what they think should be done and why. When you show that respect it generally forces the others to then truly listen to your points.

Now this sounds easy, keeping your mouth shut at first and paying attention prior to talking. But it's not that simple because most people tend to talk in terms of proposed solutions rather than key concerns. And many times when they list "key concerns", it's not their primary concerns but rather the concerns that they think will convince people to agree with their proposed solution.

A good example was the lead-up to the Iraq war. If you listened to the Bush Administration members when they talked at length, it became clear that their key concern was a desire to somehow inject Democracy into a major Arabic country. I don't know if speaking to this key concern would have led to a different approach – but the odds would have been better.

So truly listening oftentimes requires asking questions as needed to dive into each person's reasoning. This does not need to be even a 5 minute deep inquiry – most times a question or two gets to the root of the issue.

The other benefit to this approach is if everyone is trying to understand the key concerns of everyone, many times a group will quickly come to agreement on the best solution. Not always, but many times. And that leads not only to better solutions on average, but buy-in from everyone which improves morale & productivity.

As always, particularly when a manager, you need to lead by example. And if you think you do this, I'll give you the test I give my managers. When you've finished listening to everyone else (as the manager you should go last so you don't influence because of your title), can you first lay out everyone's core concerns and their main arguments to back it up?

If you can, then you didn't need to read the above article J.

Additional studies on productivity

This is from an email I recently received:

Apple:

http://pfeifferreport.com/Cin_Disp30_Bench_Rep.pdf

 

University of Utah: (about multiple monitors, not size)

http://www.humis.utah.edu/humis/docs/organization_951_1147817063.pdf

 

About the differences in productivity between the best and the worst progammers: There must be a reference to a study in Code Complete by Steve McConnell as he also mentions the number 10x and he was always giving references to studie as far as I remember.

Most incompetent management in America? (Home Depot)

Here in Boulder we have an excellent hardware store McGuckin. The rule of thumb in Boulder is if McGuckin does not have it, it does not exist. Well this morning they didn't have something so I figured I would try the new Home Depot 2 blocks away. Big mistake.

They had a greeter at the front of the store and I asked her where the window coverings section is. She had to refer to a map because "she had just started and didn't know where anything is." That's brilliant - put someone new up front to give people directions.

I couldn't find it and after finding an employee (very difficult task) they directed me to their home design center on the 2nd floor. The two employees there doing nothing said I had to wait and talk to the one employee helping a customer. Those two went back to talking with each other (I think about Paris Hilton). The one I was waiting on was just starting with a customer on picking out colors for something so I left not wanting to wait 10 minutes to then be told they probably don't have it.

I then went to pick up some emergency lights for the house. After looking in the emergency lighting section and not finding it I asked for help and was directed to another part of the store. Apparently emergency lights are not in the emergency lighting section.

So then I go up to pay. Finally, I'm getting out of there... Not so fast. The self-serve register says the weight is wrong for the emergency light I scanned. The woman running the central unit for the self-serve registers was busy staring off into space. I waited half a minute and then gave up and left.

But our saga does not end here. When I came home I went to their website and entered the above in their register a complaint section. I clicked submit and got a page error. That's right - the Home Depot website throws away complaints.

By this time I was upset. They list a phone number there so I figure I'll call and just let them know that their website doesn't accept complaints. After listening to a menu that was close to 2 minutes long it finally got to the final option - did you wish to tell them about a good or not so good experience at one of the stores. If so press 7.

I pressed 7 and it hung up on me.

Home Depot - they may have crappy service but there are making damn sure that they will never be told so. And they paid some bozo how many hundreds of millions to manage something so dysfunctional? Home Depot reminds me of Chrysler - all these great articles, awards, etc. and underneath it all, a very badly run business going downhill on the fundamentals.

Tremendous P.R. Opportunity

Well if I was Marriot or Hyatt I would be telling one of my Washington DC hotels to find a place for Fran O'Brien's and then offer them a very favorable lease and offer to make any facility changes needed for the wounded vets.

Then just a simple announcement that they are honored to be able to show appreciation to the vets this way. And the only conditions on the lease is that the dinners continue and that they be allowed to help put them on.

This would pay back many many times over with the kind of good press that no amount of marketing money could buy. And at the same time they get to stick it to Hilton.

Trackbacks: Mudville Gazette

The World's Dumbest P.R. Department

Almost every week you see some story of a company doing something where you are left thinking - how on earth could they be so stupid. I'm not talking New Coke where they tried something, it didn't fly, and they went back to old Coke. That was a reasonable business decision and when they realized it wasn't working - they reverted.

No we're talking the category here like the idiocy of Abercrombe & Fitch with their racist clothing line. Even dumber than this is the recent actions of the Hilton Hotels.

There is a steak house in Washington D.C. that has been quietly serving steak dinners to wounded vets for free, Friday nights for the last 2 years. Their efforts have been greatly appreciated throughout the military because they are helping those who were very seriously wounded.

So Hilton decided to not renew the lease for the restaurant which is located in the Capital Hilton. Rather than re-list what happened here, please read it as reported in the Mudville Gazette (right wing) and TPM Cafe (left wing). Also savefrans.org.

Now here's the thing. When both the Washington Post and the Washington Times are telling you that you are being a dick - chances are you are being a dick. And even if you know you are in the right, when you have this kind of bad press - you need to address it. And address it means that you satisfy people with your response.

So what has the Hilton company done?

• People who are highly respected in the blogosphere are saying that the Hilton Corporation is lying. And their answers sure sound bogus to me. Lying just makes a bad situation worse.
• They refuse to talk to people. If you have a ton of pissed off people emailing you, you are only going to anger them more if you refuse to listen to them. How much would it cost Hilton to hire some people to handle all of the incoming email? Note to the Hilton executives - just because the email no longer gets to you does not mean that the problem is gone.
• I tried to contact their P.R. department about a week ago on a totally unrelated issue. Never got a reply back. I did get an auto-reply from one of the P.R. addresses saying that they were on vacation. When you are being pounded with bad P.R. don't go on vacation and do answer emails from people who are authors, journalists, or active bloggers (or in my case - all three).
• When the issue appears like it may be due to the Hilton not fixing the facilities to comply with the ADA, answer that. It's not just the legal liability, it's the fact that a lot of people will assume that this is true if you do not address it.
• And if you can avoid it at all, do not screw wounded vets. Every member of the military, every family member, every retired vet, all of them now know that the Hilton Hotels are screwing over the wounded vets. I'm not in the military, never have been, and I know. I think you would be hard pressed to find something you could do that would upset members of the military more than this. The only thing that comes to mind is if the Hilton supported the scum that picket military funerals.

What blows my mind about this is that the Hilton has gone into a bunker mentality where they are insisting that everything is ok. It's like they are the Bush White House. Yes they can end the lease. This is known as winning the battle and losing the war.

It's not just that for the near future military conferences will tend to avoid any Hilton property. It's not just that military families will tend to not stay in hotels that say Hilton. It's not even that the lost business over the next couple of years will be greater than any cost of continuing the lease.

And it's not even the issue that there will be times in the future where Hilton will be asking for a variance and that some of the politicians voting on this variance will be ex military and gee - no the variance is refused.

What makes this incredibly dumb is that the financially sensible action for Hilton to take is to apologize to everyone, renew the lease, and donate money to support the meals. They could make all of this go away mainly by issuing a statement with 5 little words - "we're sorry, we were wrong."

It makes you wonder how fucked up the rest of Hilton is when they basically have handled this in the worst possible manner. So the World's Dumbest P.R. Department goes to Hilton, not for the initial dumb action - but the incredibly bad way in which they have handled it after it blew up.

Inexcusably stupid. Senior management is paid how much to run a corporation this way? I think Paris Hilton would do a better job as CEO.

Update - Another post as to the integrity of the Hilton Corporation. This is just sad.

Why is Norton such badly written software?

I just got a call from my mom who was trying to install Norton Anti-virus. It insisted that she must enter her proxy server to install - even though she is on a dial up and has no proxy server.

Which lead me to the question, why is Norton's software so badly written? And based on how bad the parts you see are, it makes you wonder if the anti-virus under the covers is equally as bad. Specifically:

1. The install program is not signed. So you don't "know" it's from Norton. For a security product this is inexcusable.
2. I've been programming for over 20 years. Yet I would estimate that 25% of the time I or my wife or daughters go to pay for the yearly upgrade, I end up having to call Norton tech support to complete the purchase/install. This not only costs Symantec a lot of money unnecessarily, but it wastes my time.
3. You can't turn off notifications. I ended up turning off worm protection because it kept poping up a status message that it was scannig for worms. Don't interrupt me unless it's a problem.

All in all, its just sad that a company this large that sells so many copies of their software can't get the basics right. And it makes you wonder about the actual anti-virus code. If it's as poor as the parts that are visible, then it's pretty poor protection.

ps - I'll bet no senior executive at Norton installs or updates anti-virus for themselves.

Agile may just be for some

I was reading an article about Agile programming the other day when a thought struck me. When I first look at a programming problem, even if it's a significant effort that will take a team 6 - 12 months of effort, I get a picture in my head of the basic design pretty quickly.

And that basic design tends to match the final product. It may match because I keep pushing in the direction of what is in my head or it may be that I just come up with the "best" approach - but the final product does match.

So when the agile approach says to just design for the module you are working on - basically I can't. I design that module in the context of a complete architecture. And this is a good thing - designing each piece in the context of the full architecture.

But this raises an interesting question. I think most programmers cannot picture the entire architecture up front. But a minority of them can. What if the proponents of agile programming tend to be in this minority that can picture the entire architecture in their head - and the architecture they picture is correct. (Read the book Blink for more on this.)

Agile is a great method for programmers that can do this. But at the same time, it arguably is a terrible approach for programmers who do not have this ability. It seems to me that maybe we should look at who should use agile methodologies and who should not.

Facts are inconvenient things

Ok, at one company morale was in the toilet so they brought in a communication expert to talk to everyone. The root problem, which was reiterated by employee after employee, was some major issues with senior management.

So what was the summation of the study? That the problem was too much complaining. And the company then fired the middle management (the people who had the thankless job of trying to keep things moving forward in spite of senior management) and told everyone that they needed to stop complaining.

Well... That definitely will stop the complaining for awhile. On the flip side, when things get so bad that senior management can't hide from it anymore, it will probably be so bad that it will mean the end of the company.

You can shoot the messengers and hide from facts for awhile. But when you do, you pretty much guarantee that you will be totally screwed when the problems become so bad that you can no longer stick your head in the sand. And yet… management will be shocked when it happens.

Of course, maybe senior management is right - the problem is that all the employees are negative and complaining all of the time. But if that is the problem - who's responsibility is it that the entire company operates that way?

(note: subject is a quote from Winston Churchill.)

What comes first

I was involved in a discussion the other day as to development methodoligies - agile vs waterfall vs ... And it hit me that the methodology discussion was, at best, a tertiary factor on team success.

What comes first is clearly the members of the team themselves. Are they very good developers, dev leads, product managers, program managers, etc. People who are very smart, very good at what they do, interact professionally with each other, and understand that success comes from the team working together.

And second is the environment, culture, and morale of the workplace. Does the team feel valued, do they own their design and work, are they treated as professionals, are they given the tools and workspace necessary to do their job well.

I bring this up because I have seen companies treat their developers as pluggable cogs and they provide a work environment that makes it clear that the development members are not valued.

I see this done for two reasons (in my estimation). First is that people in upper management think that programmers are fungable. They don't understand that, at least so far, being a really good programmer cannot be taught and good programmers are very valuable.

Second, people in upper management will work to save every penny, not balancing that savings against the productivity hit that occurs when that savings negatively impacts morale. I think the best example of this is software companies that do not provide free soda. Free soda is so common, not providing it becomes a symbol to developers that the company is going to do the bare minimum for them.

So before you get into the agile vs other argument, as yourself this; 1) Do you have the best people you can working for you? 2) Are you providing them with an environment that makes them feel valued? 3) Are you providing them with a workspace and tools that allows them to be productive?

Once you have good people free to do their best, the rest becomes a lot easier.