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Christopher Alexander, architect and philosopher, is best known for his observations on the design process. He frames his concepts in an architectural idiom, but some of his ideas have had influence far beyond the field of architecture. (Alexander’s book Notes on the Synthesis of Form, for example, is considered a kind of holy book by designers of all kinds.)
The master plan is an attempt to impose totalitarian order. A single and therefore uniform vision governs the whole. In no two places is the same function achieved differently. A side effect of the totalitarian view is that the conceptualization of the facility is frozen in time.
In place of the master plan, Alexander proposes a meta-plan. It is a philosophy by which a facility can grow in an evolutionary fashion to achieve the needs of its occupants. The meta-plan has three parts: • A philosophy of piecemeal growth • A set of patterns or shared design principles governing growth • Local control of design by those who will occupy the space
The problem of windowless space is a direct result of a square aspect ratio. If buildings are constructed in a fairly narrow shape, there need be no shortage of windows. A sensible limit for building width is thirty feet, such as the building shown in Figure 13–4.
At the entrance to the workplace should be some area that belongs to the whole group. It constitutes a kind of hearth for the group. Further along the intimacy gradient should be space for the tightly knit work groups to interact and to socialize. Finally, there is the protected quiet thinking space for one person to work alone.
People usually don’t stay put long enough, and the manager just doesn’t have enough leverage to make a difference in their nature. 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.
Evolution has planted in each of us a certain uneasiness toward people who differ by very much from the norm. It is clear how this tendency serves evolution’s purposes. You can observe this evolutionary defense in yourself in your reactions to a horror film, for instance. The almost human “creature” is much more upsetting than the mile-wide eyeless blob that slowly digests Detroit.
Of course, popping corn leaves an unmistakable smell. Someone from the rarified altitudes of upper management smelled the smell and reacted. He declared in a memo, “Popcorn is not professional,” and so would henceforth be forbidden.
The term unprofessional is often used to characterize surprising and threatening behavior. Anything that upsets the weak manager is almost by definition unprofessional. So popcorn is unprofessional. Long hair is unprofessional if it grows out of a male head, but perfectly okay if it grows out of a female head.
In one letter he observes that unless they are given side arms, the junior officers will be completely unable to lead their men into battle. Using a gun to lead means you have to “lead” from behind. This is what work-extraction leadership is all about. The gun, in the workplace, is replaced with delegated authority and positional power.
But the best leadership—the kind that people can mention only with evident emotion and deep respect—is most often exercised by people without positional power. It happens outside the official hierarchy of delegated authority.
In this example, leadership is not about extracting anything from us; it’s about service. The leadership that the Mikes of the world provide enables their endeavors to go forth. While they sometimes set explicit directions, their main role is that of a catalyst, not a director. They make it possible for the magic to happen.
In order to lead without positional authority—without anyone ever appointing you leader—you have to do what Mike does: • Step up to the task. • Be evidently fit for the task. • Prepare for the task by doing the required homework ahead of time. • Maximize value to everyone. • Do it all with humor and obvious goodwill. It also helps to have charisma.
The things they do later on in their career, however, are to a much greater degree right-brain activities. Management, in particular, requires holistic thinking, heuristic judgment, and intuition based upon experience. So the aptitude test may give you people who perform better in the short term, but are less likely to succeed later on. Maybe you should use an aptitude test but hire only those who fail it.
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.
The younger your people are, the more likely they are to see e-mail as a verbose and dreary waste of time. The terseness of texting is much more to their taste. In an era that celebrates bandwidth, the hot technology for them is the lowest bandwidth tool available: typing with their thumbs.
If the organization is a development shop, it will optimize for the short term, exploit people, cheat on the workplace, and do nothing to conserve its very lifeblood, the peopleware that is its only real asset. If we ran our agricultural economy on the same basis, we’d eat our seed corn immediately and all starve next year.
Many of us have come to believe that companies that promote early are where the action is. That’s natural, because as young workers we’re eager to get ahead. But from the corporate perspective, late promotion is a sign of health. In companies with low turnover, promotion into the first-level management position comes only after as much as ten years with the company. (This has long been true of some of the strongest organizations within IBM, for example.) The people at the lowest level have on the average at least five years’ experience. The hierarchy is low and flat.
The best organizations are not of a kind; they are more notable for their dissimilarities than for their likenesses. But one thing that they all share is a preoccupation with being the best.
The best organizations are consciously striving to be best. This is a common goal that provides common direction, joint satisfaction, and a strong binding effect. There is a mentality of permanence about such places, the sense that you’d be dumb to look for a job elsewhere—people would look at you as though you were daft. This is the kind of community feeling that characterized the American small towns of the past.
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.
What matters is not so much how the bean counters must report these things to the IRS or to the stockholders, but how managers think about the amount their company has invested in its people. This human capital can be substantial; thinking about it erroneously as sunk expense may lead managers toward actions that fail to preserve the value of an organization’s investment.
Of course, “actions that fail to preserve the value of an organization’s investment” are a staple of imperfect management. Companies go through periods in which middle and upper managers vie to outdo each other in thinking up ways to improve near-term performance (quarterly earnings) by sacrificing the longer term. This is usually called “bottom-line consciousness,” but we prefer to give it another name: “eating the seed corn.”
Companies that downsize are frankly admitting that their upper management has blown it.
What’s in the foreground of most of our prized work memories is team interaction. When a group of people fuse into a meaningful whole, the entire character of the work changes. The challenge of the work is important, but not in and of itself; it is important because it gives us something to focus on together.
We tend to use the word team fairly loosely in the business world, calling any group of people assigned to work together a “team.” But many of these groups just don’t seem like teams. They don’t have a common definition of success or any identifiable team spirit. Something is missing. What is missing is a phenomenon we call jell.
In some cases, jelled teams working on assignments that others would declare downright dull have a simply marvelous time.
Prior to a team’s jelling, the individuals on the team might have had a diversity of goals. But as part of the jelling process, they have all bought into the common goal.
After all, professional workers are supposed to accept their employer’s goals as a condition of employment. That’s what it means to be a professional.
Organizational goals come in for constant scrutiny by the people who work for the organization, and most of those goals are judged to be awfully arbitrary.
The dilemma here is that as boss, you have probably accepted the corporate goal (bring the project home by next April for less than $750,000), and accepted it wholeheartedly. If your staff isn’t just as enthusiastic, you’re disappointed. Their lack of interest might seem almost treasonous to you. But hold on here: Is it possible that your own strong identification with a corporate goal stems from something beyond mere professionalism? Isn’t it true that some artful engineering on the part of your boss and the powers above has made that corporate goal line up exactly with one of your own?
Throughout the upper ranks of the organization, there is marvelous ingenuity at work to be sure that each manager has a strong personal incentive to accept the corporate goals. Only at the bottom, where the real work is performed, does this ingenuity fail. There we count on “professionalism” and nothing else to assure that people are all pulling in the same direction. Lots of luck.
While the executive committee may get itself all heated up over a big increase in profits, this same objective is pretty small potatoes to people at the bottom of the heap. PROFIT UP ONE BILLION DOLLARS AT MEGALITHIC INC. Ho-hum. COMPANY LOGS RECORD QUARTER. Zzzzzzzz.
Increasing the company’s already huge profit was not something the average worker could easily identify with, but management seemed to think it was.
They asked me to share this fact with the rest of the team, “to focus their efforts.” I had never worked on a more focused team in my life, but I dutifully passed the word on the next morning.
Getting the system built was an arbitrary goal, but the team had accepted it. It was what they had formed around. From the time of jelling, the team itself had been the real focus for their energies. They were in it for joint success, the pleasure of achieving the goal, any goal, together. Refocusing their attention on the company’s interest in the project didn’t help. It just made success seem trivial and meaningless.
Goals of corporations are always going to seem arbitrary to people—corporations seem arbitrary to people—but the arbitrariness of goals doesn’t mean no one is ever going to accept them. If it did, we wouldn’t have sports. The goals in sports are always utterly arbitrary. The Universe doesn’t care whether the little white ball goes between the posts at Argentina’s end of the field or those at Italy’s. But a lot of people get themselves very involved in the outcome. Their involvement is a function of the social units they belong to.
In spite of the useful energy and enthusiasm that characterize jelled teams, managers don’t take particular pains to foster them. Part of the reason is an imperfect understanding of why teams matter. The manager who is strongly motivated toward goal attainment is likely to observe that teams don’t attain goals; people on the teams attain goals.
Most of this work is done by individuals working alone.
The purpose of a team is not goal attainment but goal alignment.
There is a sense of eliteness on a good team. Team members feel they’re part of something unique. They feel they’re better than the run of the mill. They have a cocky, SWAT Team attitude that may be faintly annoying to people who aren’t part of the group.
The team space is decorated with views of the product as it approaches completion.
The final sign of a jelled team is the obvious enjoyment that people take in their work. Jelled teams just feel healthy. The interactions are easy and confident and warm.
The difference between a team and a clique is like the difference between a breeze and a draft. Breeze and draft have identical meanings: They both mean “cool current of air.” If you find that cool current of air delightful, you call it a breeze; if you find it annoying, you call it a draft. The connotations are different, but the denotation is the same.
Then there is the awful thought that a tightly knit team may leave en masse and take all of its energy and enthusiasm over to the competition.
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.
But hold on here, aren’t these the very things that managers spend much or even most of their time doing? Sadly, yes. And yet these actions are likely to be teamicidal.
Even people who think of themselves as Deming-ites have trouble with this one. They are left gasping, What the hell are we supposed to do instead?
Deming’s point is that MBO and its ilk are managerial cop-outs. By using simplistic extrinsic motivators to goad performance, managers excuse themselves from harder matters such as investment, direct personal motivation, thoughtful team formation, staff retention, and ongoing analysis and redesign of work procedures. Our point here is somewhat more limited: Any action that rewards team members differentially is likely to foster competition. Managers need to take steps to decrease or counteract this effect.
