More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The major problems of our work are not so much technological as sociological in nature.
The researchers who made fundamental breakthroughs in those areas are in a high-tech business. The rest of us are appliers of their work.
The average level of technology may be modestly improved by any steps you take to inhibit error. The team sociology, however, can suffer grievously.
You may be able to kick people to make them active, but not to make them creative, inventive, and thoughtful.
There is nothing more discouraging to any worker than the sense that his own motivation is inadequate and has to be “supplemented” by that of the boss.
uniqueness is what makes project chemistry vital and effective. It’s something to be cultivated.
The catalyst is important because the project is always in a state of flux. Someone who can help a project to jell is worth two people who just do work.
Productivity ought to mean achieving more in an hour of work, but all too often it has come to mean extracting more for an hour of pay.
Overtime for salaried workers is a figment of the naïve manager’s imagination. Oh, there might be some benefit in a few extra hours worked on Saturday to meet a Monday deadline, but that’s almost always followed by an equal period of compensatory “undertime” while the workers catch up with their lives. Throughout the effort, there will be more or less an hour of undertime for every hour of overtime. The trade-off might work to your advantage for the short term, but for the long term it will cancel out.
Overtime is like sprinting: It makes some sense for the last hundred yards of the marathon for those with any energy left, but if you start sprinting in the first mile, you’re just wasting time.
Workaholism is an illness, but not an illness like alcoholism that affects only the unlucky few. Workaholism is more like the common cold: Everyone has a bout of it now and then.
People under time pressure don’t work better—they just work faster.
There may be many and varied causes of emotional reaction in one’s personal life, but in the workplace, the major arouser of emotions is threatened self-esteem.
letting the builder set a satisfying quality standard of his own will result in a productivity gain sufficient to offset the cost of improved quality.
The most surprising part of the 1985 Jeffery-Lawrence study appeared at the very end, when they investigated the productivity of 24 projects for which no estimates were prepared at all. These projects far outperformed all the others
But even if coding and testing went away entirely, you couldn’t expect a gain of 100 percent.
most of what you’re doing is not truly high-tech work.
Unless you’ve been asleep at the switch for the past few decades, change of a language won’t do much for you. It might give you a 5-percent gain (nothing to sneeze at), but not more.
know: The manager’s function is not to make people work, but to make it possible for people to work.
Police-mentality planners design workplaces the way they would design prisons: optimized for containment at minimal cost.
While this [10 to 1] productivity differential among programmers is understandable, there is also a 10 to 1 difference in productivity among software organizations.
The data presented above does not exactly prove that a better workplace will help people to perform better. It may only indicate that people who perform better tend to gravitate toward organizations that provide a better workplace.
title. The only method we have ever seen used to confirm claims that the open plan improves productivity is proof by repeated assertion.
Anything you need to quantify can be measured in some way that is superior to not measuring it at all.
• Get the right people. • Make them happy so they don’t want to leave. • Turn them loose.
So the people who work for you through whatever period will be more or less the same at the end as they were at the beginning. If they’re not right for the job from the start, they never will be.
most hiring mistakes result from too much attention to appearances and not enough to capabilities.
SECOND THERMODYNAMIC LAW OF MANAGEMENT: Entropy is always increasing in the organization.
Disney Fellow Alan Kay defines technology as whatever is around you today but was not there when you were growing up. He further observes that what was already around you when you were growing up has a name: It’s called environment. One generation’s technology is the next generation’s environment.
A common feature of companies with the lowest turnover is widespread retraining. You’re forever bumping into managers and officers who started out as secretaries, payroll clerks, or in the mailroom. They came into the company green, often right out of school. When they needed new skills to make a change, the company provided those skills. No job is a dead end.
An expense is money that gets used up. At the end of the month, the money is gone and so is the heat (or whatever the expense was for). An investment, on the other hand, is use of an asset to purchase another asset. The value has not been used up, but only converted from one form to another. When you treat an expenditure as an investment instead of as an expense, you are capitalizing the expenditure.
Companies that downsize are frankly admitting that their upper management has blown it.
Companies that manage their investment sensibly will prosper in the long run. Companies of knowledge workers have to realize that it is their investment in human capital that matters most. The good ones already do.
There is very little true teamwork required in most of our work. But teams are still important, for they serve as a device to get everyone pulling in the same direction. The purpose of a team is not goal attainment but goal alignment. When the team is fulfilling its purpose, team members are more effective because they’re more directed.
The jelled work group may be cocky and self-sufficient, irritating and exclusive, but it does more to serve the manager’s real goals than any assemblage of interchangeable parts could ever do.
Of course, if the people are badly suited to the job, you should get new people. But once you’ve decided to go with a given group, your best tactic is to trust them. Any defensive measure taken to guarantee success in spite of them will only make things worse. It may give you some relief from worry in the short term, but it won’t help in the long run, and it will poison any chance for the team to jell.
The team phenomenon, as we’ve described it, is something that happens only at the bottom of the hierarchy. For all the talk about “management teams,” there really is no such thing—certainly never jelled teams at the managerial level. When managers are bonded into teams, it’s only because they serve dual roles: manager on the one hand and group member on the other. They become accepted as part-time peers by the people they manage. As you go higher and higher in the organization chart, the concept of jelled teams recedes further and further into oblivion.
good managers provide frequent easy opportunities for the team to succeed together.
This Open Kimono attitude is the exact opposite of defensive management. You take no steps to defend yourself from the people you’ve put into positions of trust. And all the people under you are in positions of trust. A person you can’t trust with any autonomy is of no use to you.
If you’ve got decent people under you, there is probably nothing you can do to improve their chances of success more dramatically than to get yourself out of their hair occasionally.
Visual supervision is a joke for development workers. Visual supervision is for prisoners.
Presented below is an admittedly simplistic list of the elements of a chemistry-building strategy for a healthy organization: • Make a cult of quality. • Provide lots of satisfying closure. • Build a sense of eliteness. • Allow and encourage heterogeneity. • Preserve and protect successful teams. • Provide strategic but not tactical direction.
The cult of quality works like the grain of sand in an oyster; it is a focal point for the team to bind around.
frequent closure is important. Team members need to get into the habit of succeeding together and liking it. This is part of the mechanism by which the team builds momentum.
The great manager knows that people can’t be controlled in any meaningful sense anyway. The essence of successful management is to get everyone pulling in the same direction and then somehow get them fired up to the point that nothing, not even their manager, could stop their progress.
The structure of a team is a network, not a hierarchy.
Better ways to achieve convergence of method are Training: People do what they know how to do. If you give them all a common core of methods, they will tend to use those methods. Tools: A few automated aids for modeling, design, implementation, and test will get you more convergence of method than all the statutes you can pass. Peer Review: In organizations where there are active peer-review mechanisms (quality circles, walkthroughs, inspections, technology fairs), there is a natural tendency toward convergence.
You can’t really declare something a standard until it has already become a de facto standard.
People were charmed by differentness, they liked the attention, they were intrigued by novelty. This has come to be called the Hawthorne Effect. Loosely stated, it says that people perform better when they’re trying something new.
To understand why not managing even this one risk is dangerous, you need to consider the real reason for risk management: It’s not to make the risks go away, but to enable sensible mitigation should they occur. And mitigation may well have to be planned and provisioned well ahead of time.
