Slack Quotes

“Leadership is the ability to enroll other people in your agenda. Meaningful acts of leadership usually cause people to accept some short-term pain (extra cost or effort, delayed gratification) in order to increase the long-term benefit. We need leadership for this, because we all tend to be short-term thinkers.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“If nothing is declared unchangeable, then the organization will resist all change. When there is no defining vision, the only way the organization can define itself is its stasis. Like the human creature that fights wildly to resist changing whatever it considers its identity, the corporate organism without vision will hold on to stasis as its only meaningful definition of self.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“And so they discussed for hours how to work an on-line auction into a company that had nothing to auction and no particular auction skills or capabilities. “What was missing from that meeting, ” Sheila observed, “was someone who was willing to say, ‘Auction might be nice, but it just isn’t us.’” It’s nontrivial for a company and everyone in it to know “who we are.” A little bit easier, however, is to know “who we aren’t.” When even that knowledge is missing—when there is no basis in the company to say about a given cockamamy scheme “it just isn’t us”—the company clearly lacks vision.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“Believers insist that dysfunction is not an intrinsic flaw of MBO, but a simple matter of poor implementation. When dysfunction occurs, they (our era’s new commissars) refine and redefine the objectives and try again. After five decades of experience with MBO, its believers are still refining and redefining and still waiting for results. I’m ready to call MBO’s constant failure intrinsic.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“A company in this kind of flux can be viewed as a portfolio of projects. Each project seeks to effect some change. In an older, simpler time, projects were a way to move from one status quo to another. The project was a disruption, but the new status quo, once established, could be expected to last for an extended period. Now there is no new status quo.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“Continuing stasis is a consequence of the first flawed assumption at the heart of MBO: the ingenuous belief that success of the overall organization can be viewed as a simple arithmetic combination of lower-level objectives. The assumption is almost impossible to implement unless nearly everything is in steady state.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“MANAGEMENT BY OBJECTIVES is a fad from the 1950s, now largely discredited. But it hasn’t gone away. Badly run companies everywhere are still plagued by this simplistic, easy-as-pie management technique that most often achieves ends that are the exact opposite of those intended and desired. Like most hard-to-shake diseases, this one seems to thrive on the same mix of factors that damages its host. And it is self-perpetuating: MBO companies respond to each failed quarter by instituting still more MBO. Bottom-line failures are excused as due to uncontrollable market factors, while successive improvements in selected quantitatively expressed objectives are loudly touted as proof that management really is succeeding in spite of the dismal results. MBO Primer Here’s how it works: Performance of each department or division of the company is characterized by one or a few quantitative measures, called objectives. Managers are now encouraged to manage to the objectives, to cause each indicator to move in the desired direction toward its selected target. A manager is declared to have succeeded completely if the objective meets or exceeds the target.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“As defense against failure, standard process is a kind of armor. The more worried you are about failure, the heavier the armor you put on. But armor always has a side effect of reduced mobility.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“Process standardization from on high is disempowerment. It is a direct result of fearful management, allergic to failure.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“Each of these standards says, in effect, “I will dictate to you exactly how you must do every aspect of the work … except the hard part.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“Meeting the deadline is not what this is all about. What this is about is looking like you’re trying your damnedest to meet the deadline. In this age of “lean and mean,” it is positively unsafe for you to run the project with a lean (optimal) staff.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“The nature of project work is that whatever it is you’re about to build, the early conceptual phases are crucial. But this kind of conceptual work can’t be done with a crowd of people. A staff of no more than six might make perfect sense while the first-cut design decisions are made. Burdening the project with an extra fifty people at this stage will only make the work go slower. Or worse: With that many people on your budget, your every incentive as manager is to find something (anything!) for them to do. All your available choices here are bad. Anything you assign that many people to do locks you into conceptual decisions that haven’t yet been thought out. You’re forced to partition the whole—this kind of partitioning is the essence of design—along lines that are dictated by personnel-loading considerations rather than design considerations. The result is sure to be a mediocre or poor design, something that will encumber the project from this point on.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“We also assign ourselves to lower-level work because we’re fleeing from challenge. Yes, I know, we all love a good challenge, but that doesn’t mean we don’t sometimes get cold feet and look for a way out. The challenges of management are daunting: They lead us into the scarily intangible world of people relations, motivation, societal formation, conflict, and conflict resolution. In my own case, I was promoted into a management position, fresh from a technological job where there were no intangibles. I had been a real-time system designer just before my promotion. Systems design is deliciously black-and-white: Your design works or it doesn’t. It is sufficiently flexible and accommodating to change or it isn’t. You may not know this perfectly at design time, but the implementation phase, which comes next, will quickly prove your design acceptable (even elegant) or not. There are few nuances.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“Risk mitigation is the set of actions you will take to reduce the impact of a risk should it materialize. There are two not-immediately-obvious aspects to risk mitigation: The plan has to precede materialization. Some of the mitigation activities must also precede materialization.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“Setting aside a risk reserve with a 50 percent or better confidence level is called risk containment. When risks are paid for out of this reserve, they are said to be contained.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“Instead of authority and consequence (the management staples of the factory floor), the best knowledge-work managers are known for their powers of persuasion, negotiation, markers to call in, and their large reserves of accumulated trust.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“Authoritarian management is obsessed with time. It is destructive of slack and inclined to goad people into outperforming their peers. And it makes learning impossible.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“There is no such thing as “healthy” competition within a knowledge organization; all internal competition is destructive. The nature of our work is that it cannot be done by any single person in isolation. Knowledge work is by definition collaborative. The necessary collaboration is not limited to the insides of lowest-level teams; there has to be collaboration as well between teams and between and among the organizations the teams belong to.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“The status meeting I’ve portrayed is not really a meeting at all; it’s a ceremony. At a real meeting, n people put their heads together to arrive at some conclusion or to take some new direction that requires the input and participation of all. Taking turns talking to the boss is not a meeting in this sense. It is, rather, a ritual that acknowledges and celebrates the bossness of the boss. There is need for ritual in business, I guess, but let’s at least understand that the weekly status meeting is not really a meeting.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“Each time you give trust in advance of demonstrated performance, you flirt with danger. If you’re risk-averse, you won’t do it. And that’s a shame, because the most effective way to gain the trust and loyalty of those beneath you is to give the same in equal measure.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“Here I see one pattern common to all the winners. The one mechanical practice they all have in common is this: They acquire trust by giving trust.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“Parents’ Rule: Always give trust slightly in advance of demonstrated trustworthiness.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“The emerging leader simply doesn’t have time to gain trust by demonstrating trustworthiness, even if that were possible. The only path to success is to acquire not-yet-deserved trust. So, if you are the brand-new CEO of Hewlett-Packard, for example, you find yourself empowered not so much by the sober judgment of those below (“I conclude that the new boss has proved herself worthy to be followed”), but by their collective hunch (“I’ll bet she’s gonna be a winner!”).”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“The person who fails is a hero, the backbone of the change effort. Failure gains that person more respect, not less.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“Irony and sarcasm, pointed jabbing criticism, personal mockery, public humiliation, exasperation, managerial tantrums, eye-rolling: These are the true enemies of essential change. To make an organization change-receptive, you need to rout all of these various kinds of disrespect from the culture. Replace them with a clearly felt sense that people at all levels are to be honored for the struggle they’ve been willing to take on.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“a manager who is 40 percent used up making operations happen is not viewed as 60 percent reclaimable expense. Rather, he/she is viewed as someone doing leadership 60 percent of the time. If there is an incentive to change this formula, it suggests looking for ways to decrease the time spent running operations to free up more capacity for leading the transformation.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“THERE’S LEADERSHIP, and then there’s “leadership.” The first conveys vision, engenders confidence, and encourages striving toward common goals. The other doesn’t.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“The successful visionary statement will typically have the following characteristics: 1. There has to be an element of present truth to the assertion. The challenge “Run a four-minute mile because that’s what we are all about ” would not inspire most of us because we wouldn’t see the present truth of the “what we’re all about” part. 2. There is always an element of proposed future truth in the statement. Though it masquerades as “what we are all about, ” it is at least partly urging us toward “what we could be all about.” 3. When the statement walks perfectly between what is and what could be, and the could-be part is wonderful but not impossible, acceptance by those listening is almost assured.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“Successful change can only come in the context of a clear understanding of what may never change, what the organization stands for. This is what Peter Drucker calls the organization’s culture. Culture, as he uses the term, is that which cannot, will not, and must not change.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“Fisher’s fundamental theorem: “The more highly adapted an organism becomes, the less adaptable it is to any new change.” Fisher’s example was the giraffe. It is highly adapted to food found up among the tree branches, but so unadaptable to a new situation that it can not even pick up a peanut from the ground at the zoo. The more optimized an organism (organization) is, the more likely that the slack necessary to help it become more effective has been eliminated.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency