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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Gene Kim
Read between
February 8 - February 15, 2022
Punishing failure and “shooting the messenger” only cause people to hide their mistakes, and eventually, all desire to innovate is completely extinguished.
I expect leaders to buffer their people from all the political and bureaucratic insanity, not throw them into it.
Maxine loves coding and she’s awesome at it. But she knows that there’s something even more important than code: the systems that enable developers to be productive, so that they can write high-quality code quickly and safely, freeing themselves from all the things that prevent them from solving important business problems.
Trying to get a Phoenix build going is like playing Legend of Zelda, if it were written by a sadist, forcing her to adventure far and wide to find hidden keys scattered across the kingdom and given only measly clues from uncaring NPCs. But when you finally finish the level, you can’t actually play the next level—you have to mail paper coupons to the manufacturer and wait weeks to get the activation codes.
“Remember, safety is a precondition of work.”
‘technical debt is what you feel the next time you want to make a change.’
the First Ideal of Locality and Simplicity. We need to design things so that we have locality in our systems and the organizations that build them. And we need simplicity in everything we do. The last place we want complexity is internally, whether it’s in our code, in our organization, or in our processes. The external world is complex enough, so it would be intolerable if we allow it in things we can actually control! We must make it easy to do our work.”
“The Second Ideal is Focus, Flow, and Joy. It’s all about how our daily work feels. Is our work marked by boredom and waiting for other people to get things done on our behalf? Do we blindly work on small pieces of the whole, only seeing the outcomes of our work during a deployment when everything blows up, leading to firefighting, punishment, and burnout? Or do we work in small batches, ideally single-piece flow, getting fast and continual feedback on our work? These are the conditions that allow for focus and flow, challenge, learning, discovery, mastering our domain, and even joy.”
The Third Ideal is Improvement of Daily Work. Reflect upon what the Toyota Andon cord teaches us about how we must elevate improvement of daily work over daily work itself.
The Fourth Ideal is Psychological Safety, where we make it safe to talk about problems, because solving problems requires prevention, which requires honesty, and honesty requires the absence of fear. In manufacturing, psychological safety is just as important as physical safety.
And finally, the Fifth Ideal is Customer Focus, where we ruthlessly question whether something actually matters to our customers, as in, are they willing to pay us for it ...
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The First Ideal—Locality and Simplicity The Second Ideal—Focus, Flow, and Joy The Third Ideal—Improvement of Daily Work The Fourth Ideal—Psychological Safety The Fifth Ideal—Customer Focus
“We’ve built some amazing capabilities that other people can use too. But we can’t be the people with a solution, peddling them to people who don’t know they have a problem.”
Maxine knows she hasn’t delivered a stirring Henry V Saint Crispin Day rallying speech, but she’s dumbfounded that people aren’t more bothered by this situation. She was hoping someone would yell out, “Hell yes, that bothers me, and we’re not going to take it anymore!” But instead, there’s just silence. We don’t even need guards anymore. We love being prisoners so much, we just think the bars are there to keep us safe.
That night, she has unending dreams about being trapped in a bureaucracy, handed off from one desk to another, put on hold, asked to fill out more forms, shuffled from one department to another, and put back into another line with more forms to fill. The forms go into vast data warehouses where they are pulverized, turned into a steaming, greasy miasma of comma-separated text files, spiked with random byte-order marks. She sees the heartless machinery of bureaucracy turning, with helpless people trapped inside the countless gears. She hears their helpless screams, until they fall silent, all
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The truth is there is nothing more difficult than getting through TEP-LARB. Nothing gets through TEP and LARB. And I should know, I’m on the LARB.” “He’s right, Kurt,” Maxine says. “In all my years here, I’ve never been able to get anything through. It’s a ton of work to even fill out their forms, and I’ve never seen them actually approve anything. They’re the Grand Pointless Council of No.”
Maxine remembers a quote from Jeffrey Snover, the inventor of PowerShell. He once said, “Bash is the disease you die with, but don’t die of.”
‘Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.’
She’s always loved the Tuckman phases of teams, going through form, storm, norm, and perform.
“Good morning, and I’d like to just answer the question that you’re probably thinking. The answer is, yes, we’re the team that built the current mobile apps—both of them. We’re not proud, and we’re just glad users can’t rate an app with zero stars.”
this book XD
“You’ll have to bring that up with Chris. Banning books from the workplace is above my paygrade.”
“It’s been true for hundreds of years and probably thousands more: employee engagement and customer satisfaction are the only things that matter. If we do that right, and manage cash effectively, every other financial target will take care of itself.”
“What I’ve learned in Promotions is that it’s an extremely experimental process, an exercise of exploration and learning. Not every idea is a winner,” she says. “For every winning idea, there are many losing ideas. And some of the winners seemed outright crazy and never would have been approved by the typical middle-manager or committee. The literature suggests that in general, only one out of every three strategic ideas has a positive result, and only a third actually move the needle in a material way.
“You created one of the safest and most admired manufacturing organizations in the world by creating a unique learning culture, where physical safety is embraced by everyone in the organization,” he says. “What if psychological safety is as much of a precondition to dynamic, learning organizations as physical safety?”
“A hundred years ago, most large factories had a CPO—a chief power officer—who ran the electricity generation processes. It was one of the most important roles in manufacturing, because no electricity, no production. It was a Core process,” he says. “But that role has disappeared entirely. Electricity has become infrastructure that you buy from a utility company. It is interchangeable, and you choose suppliers primarily on price. There is rarely a competitive advantage to generating your own power. It is now merely Context, no longer Core. You don’t want to be the organization that has a large
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THE FIVE IDEALS The First Ideal: Locality and Simplicity The Second Ideal: Focus, Flow, and Joy The Third Ideal: Improvement of Daily Work The Fourth Ideal: Psychological Safety The Fifth Ideal: Customer Focus
