Stopping in briefly to point to a hell of a post by Bob Sutton on his own blog, entitled Why Management is Not a Profession. As a tangent to posts elaborating on the themes in his most recent book, The No Asshole Rule, Mr. Sutton keeps one eye on management theory. His most recent post is no exception, and with unusual force (perhaps a smidge of radical honesty ?) Sutton rips into serious dissonance in the craft of management. In effect, MBA degrees are—in terms of long-term earnings—economically unfeasible except for a narrow caliber of programs. But Sutton adds another layer to the economics around the value of an MBA: who are managers serving? If professions are meant to serve clients as best as able, can you call management a profession? According to Sutton, management’s central goal is to make as much money as possible:

Indeed, one cynic once suggested to me that if managers took an oath, rather than something like ‘first do no harm,” it would be something like “Take as much as you can from as many customers as you can without driving them into the arms of your competitors.”

The societal message of management is a very interesting ambiguity. If I could point at one underlying conflict in my own career, it would be trying to reconcile the philosophy of user-centered design —which is all about making things more usable for people—with extremely over-developed revenue arms. The populist goals of usability can’t hold up against the financial onslaught, since their fundamental tactics are totally at odds.

Mr. Sutton’s post contains a good collection of sources, links and a smart discussion in the comments, too. Professional management is flawed, which modern business proves day in and day out. Yet on the opposite side of the coin is entrepreneurs…but what about the entrepreneurial goals are less self-serving? They’re interesting thoughts, and a good undercurrent to keep in mind.

¹My alma mater’s motto which is actually a phrase near and dear to my heart. (Better than the other informal motto said of our champion hoop rollers in overly PC drivel—”shall you achieve success however you choose to define it.”)

In August, a majority of northern hemisphere residents take summer vacations, such as:

• All of France
• 99% the American government (not currently on campaign for some distant election cycle)
• Families with hyper kids who need to be over-stimulated back to placidity so they return to school in September
• Arguably all retirees¹
• Anybody neglecting their enjoyment of summer who has a sick day available
• …And lots of geeky people who suddenly go quiet on the internet.

Out of the latter group—people who gravitate to the internet professionally—many take late summer vacations under the guise of a “week offline”. It’s almost like an unspoken agreement amongst geeks that August will be the backwater month for the Internet, in tandem with the typical August slowdown across the board. (It’s worth noting, though, that most geeks still manage to post at least once from an anonymous, previously unmentioned probably mythical handheld device from “poolside”. Right, what hotel wifi stretches to the pool?)

There’s a similar August lull in a wide variety of industries. The old advertising maxim that it is ‘bad to release a new product in August’ rings true for many fields, though I’ll bet some just adopted a good excuse to slack off. Where does the lull come from, besides people deciding to slack off? The web, in particular, shouldn’t really have a downtime, in theory. But it does, by implicit connection to humanity’s collective lull. Likewise, the news has a late summer slow-down, for no apparent reason other than attention spans.

Given the slower news cycle, I find myself slipping into a malaise of passive reading and even more passive commenting. I would hazard an guess that the majority of articles & posts are merely skimmed in August.

All of this is to lament a brilliant post by author Jim Kunstler that poses some of the most concise questions I’ve read about America, our futurist mindset, the economy, work ethic and the myopic hubris of 21st Century economic and political leadership.

If I may paraphrase and/or quote:

• “For the past two decades, we have allowed [the financial industry] to become an end in itself.”
• We have squandered inspiration, credibility and momentum of American ingenuity and productivity
• Underlying the motives of the finance industry are deeper, unsettling questions about the morality of the system we’ve built—”Does our culture affirm life or yearn for destruction?”
• Can we correct our behavior, and do we even have the attention span to consider doing so, despite all the points of failure already
• “We will sell the birthrights of the next three generations in order to avoid changing our behavior. We will blame other people who behave differently for the consequences of our own behavior.”
• “The car as a mass market phenomenon, and enabler (dictator, really) of all our daily life arrangements, is finished.”
• And so on, with extremely sharp prescience and criticism. Go read it now.

After posing crystalized, difficult questions, Kunstler rips into the tenuous future of automobile. Given the richness of his points, I would have liked to see paragraphs about the morality of our culture. Also global credibility, financial illusion, philosophical and moral responsibility to latter generations, etc. Given the quality of his blog and decent comments, I doubt any of of his perspective and questioning will fade.

I need to read more blogs about the future of mobility in America, that’s for sure. Any suggestions, largely rhetorical audience?

Footnotes

¹ I’m not entirely sure retirees count as vacationers, but I can’t resist a light jibe at my retiree parents (who kindly let me crash on their Canadian timeshare couch for a few days—Bless you both, I needed the short break).

Lately my job-market reading has bounced back and forth between two streaky, prolific blogs, Employee Evolution —”The Voice of Millennials at Work”—and Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist. I’m not sure if it’s the amusingly erratic writing or the occasional prescient commentary. Either way, three or four posts from both blogs have been perma-tabbed in my browser for further scrutiny and commenting.

The most recent quality post came from Employee Evolution which offered a new twist on a topic I’ve mentioned before—the upcoming effects of stay-at-home moms re-entering the workforce. Like other blogs and analysis, EE’s JT O’Donnell predicts the following groups will re-enter the workforce to meet the upcoming baby-boomer-retirement talent shortage:

• stay-at-home moms
• semi-retired matures¹
• foreign-born workers

The Twist

Nothing really new to the list, really. But EE connected it to a surprising topic (considering the fact that nearly all of EE’s typical writers are breathless, self-assertive millennials named Ryan²). O’Donnell’s post refers to anecdotes of bosses reacting to the job-jumping of Gen-Y workers—or, rather, high turnover costs—by hiring those outside the current workplace, with the staying power and work ethic to put up with swings in morale. As a soft chide to young workers, O’Donnell suggests Gen-Y might try some personal assessment to combat a less-than-ideal job, rather than jump to fresh opportunity. Job-hopping, after all, rarely teaches you the skills of staying power and long-term vision for your career and abilities.

Personal Assessment for All!

Within O’Donnell’s post, the personal assessment suggestion was a really interesting point to make. I’m a big fan of personal assessment, particularly for women…and particularly for women in traditionally non-feminine industries (like tech and sciences). Recommending professional coaching to youngsters is a really cool step. I hope someday I work in an environment where colleagues in all stages of their careers take career assessment and work interactions as seriously as personal-life psychoanalysis. (Much more on this topic to come on LostCog, I’m sure, as I keep digging into my own professional coaching and assessment.)

Obligatory Footnotes

¹ What a horrible, dehumanizing term. It’s worse than “old folk”. While that means they can lump my Dad in as a “mature”, I’m reserving the right to call him “classic” or “vintage” like our ongoing joke.

² I have not verified that assumption with any analysis at all, not even reading the author bios for EE. It just seems like the bylines always say Ryan in my feedreader, and that amuses me.

Tom Davenport—yet another smart person blogging on Harvard Business Online—recently called for a renewed focus in business leadership: the systematic examination of decision processes. His rationale is common-sensical: history is rife with awful decisions, yet very few people take time to retrospectively analyze their decision-making. Biologically, we learn from mistakes very quickly, yet it’s a proverb that history is bound to repeat itself because we don’t take time to look backward. So why do we avoid looking back on decisions made?

If I had to pin-point one characteristic grievously missing from tech startups, it’s decision-making analysis. I wish I could say my concerns are limited to my own work experience. Unfortunately, the sheer volume of bitching from co-workers and anecdotes from friends elsewhere in the industry really negates my (self-abusive?) hope that I’m the only one in companies with virtually no hindsight, and even less analysis.

Post-Mortem?

Some managers (ahem, Craig) try “post-mortem” meetings after big project releases, which is an effort at retrospective analysis, even if it’s not directed at specifically decision-making. But the results rarely equals the effort it takes to hold such a meeting with a team of people. So why do tech teams avoid retrospective decision analysis like post-mortem meetings? I propose these are the most common responses:

• Company/team moving too fast to look back
• Problems are too inter-dependent with other projects to make clear distinctions and conclusions
• Conclusions are probably the same old scapegoats —known communication issues, known spec issues, known technology issues, managerial access, team resourcing…. (by far a partial list)
• Nobody is comfortable with giving honest, intense constructive criticism in group settings
• To really discuss the problems, you have to delve into some deep, uncomfortable stuff
• Few people intentionally prepare ahead of time, so the discussion and conclusions are shallow
• Etc., ad nauseum

I think post-mortems are set-up to fail, because they’re so easy for participants to sabotage with non-committal attitudes. I spent a good amount of time reading around the Web, looking for definitive guidelines for post-mortem meetings and analysis of their effectiveness, but found little  more  than  generic  how-tos. (I’ll keep looking, though.) In the meantime, how about we do a little decision-making analysis on post-mortems, then? Some thinking about the emotional and psychological gymnastics that go on in such meetings, anyone?

New Factors in Critiques

Going back to Mr. Davenport’s call for more advanced business training in decision-making analysis, his post goes on to add new, futurist twists: making use of emerging effects like the “wisdom of crowds” in prediction markets, and even make better use of intuition, which he freely acknowledges is gaining favor after the success of Gladwell’s Blink. (We can all thank Gladwell for letting us acknowledge we’re humans, I guess. More about this later, undoubtedly.)

While I like the idea of crowd wisdom and solo intuition as players in decision-making analysis, we should pay attention to the baby-steps—less structured attempts at decision-making analysis. If post-mortem is too big a jump for us to handle, how about just some critical thought in that direction? Along these lines, recently I’ve been reading a blog named Re-Imagineering, who’s disclaimer really says it all:

“A forum for Pixar and Disney professionals to catalog past Imagineering missteps and debate solutions in hopes that a new wave of creative management can restore some of the magic that has been missing from the parks for decades.”

Besides being super-specific and possibly over-nostalgic, the blog is a refreshing read in the area of critique. For example, a recent post entitled Strike Up the Band cheers the returns of the original Tomorrowland Terrace design, after it was replaced in the late-90s with a “a heavy-handed, grim and aggressively unappealing redressing” of the terrace, under the name Club Buzz. (Photos available on the blog post.) Design opinions aside, the blog contains an active comment discussion about both the design and the decision regarding the direction Tomorrowland is heading. Like many other company-specific, unofficial critique blogs, it gives people a place to begin some public decision-making analysis, rather than whispering in hallways, or being put on the spot in badly architected, hopeless meetings. I hope companies see the value in that type of conversation, if business does indeed add Davenport’s idea to their business school staples.

A few days ago I mentioned Scott Berkun posted an interesting side-topic on Asshole-Driven Development. At the time, I said, you know your industry has some underlying, seething critique a-comin’ when cynicism is the standard frame-of-mind used to describe problems.

Well, I couldn’t have been more right. Scott’s post was Dugg, temporarily slowing down his whole operation. It seems he hit a nerve, and hundreds of folks came out of the woodwork (including myself) with variants on his theme. About 100 variations were offered up, between Scott’s comments (as of this posting), Digg, Reddit and a mention on O’Reilly.

Given my interest in cases where management goes awry, I was greatly entertained. So much so, that I did some categorization on the responses. I read through all the posts, tagged them with some keywords and concepts, then double-checked those encodings against major themes as they emerged. Effectively I did some electronic card sorting, though without the tape, note cards and holes push-pinned into my walls. Taking Scott’s initial “styles” as themes, here’s the strengths of his original development styles¹:

Variation Groupings

• Asshole Driven development (ADD) = 7 similar comments
• Cognitive Dissonance development (CDD, “two different beliefs for solutions”) = 2
• Cover Your Ass Engineering (CYAE) = 13
• Development By Denial (DBD, “pretend there’s no problems”) = 12
• Get Me Promoted Methodology (GMPM) = 7

Taking into account I have 98 on my list, that’s a pretty good informal correlation between Scott’s development styles and general sentiment.

For your consideration, here’s a few other trends.

Asshole-Driven Development

When it comes to assholes, it’s clear from comments they come in two flavors: those who are stupidly assholes, and those who are intentionally assholes. In fact, given the resonance of Scott’s blog post title, it’s surprising how few asshole-related styles came out in the comments. I expected more. Granted, asshole behavior is a common thread in all the categories. But Scott’s comments indicate that asshole tendencies are not strictly top-down. They work laterally, too.

Cover Your Ass Development

CYA was by far the most interesting archetype, in the sense that many people confessed participation in one scheme or another. Judging from groupings, CYA behavior includes:

• finger-pointing at departed colleagues, dumb customers, bad clients, ignorant bosses, difficult QA
• citing issues with scope, redundancy, technology choices
• hiding behind unknown technology, job titles, or an upcoming departure
• lots of throwing things over walls and job titles into other peoples’ laps

Development By Denial

DBD is also a very nuanced category. Most comments centered around delaying key metrics until after launch. Little things like design, usability, real functionality, clarity, clean-up, planning maintenance cycles, etc. Out of the group, two deserve special mention: “The Process Development”, as added by Chase, wherein ”…the process of the project becomes more important than the project itself.” I almost wished I worked within such a team, until I read his description. Ouch.

The second special-mention in denial-based development methodologies is by Caleb Jenkins, the “Marco Polo Process:”

[MPP is] where the customer stands in one spot and says “Marco”, and so the developers start blindly coding in that direction, only to get there and find that the customer has moved yet again, “Marco!”, so [the developers] start blindly coding again in another direction. Process continues until everyone gets tired and decides to finally get out of the pool. “Polo!”

Now that’s just funny. I imagine the Wii Mii Parade music playing in the background.

Get Me My Promotion!

To be honest, promotion- and accolade-related themes were focused on employees and managers selling each other out. However, a second theme arose in the comments: development driven (or not driven) by classic workplace villains like patent races, lawyers, good ol’ boys networks and general inertia as bosses wait out retirement on their initial cash cow, limping to the finish line. Given the youth of the tech industry, I was surprised to see those themes. They seem…quaint, in a maddening kind of way.

Cognitive Dissonance

Given more than 140 comments and 100+ additions, I’m surprised Scott got 4 out of 5 major themes² right. Cognitive Dissonance he missed, at least in popular agreement. Only one other person mentioned a scenario where a project was divided between two poles. In essence, troubles are big enough with just one. Enough said.

Other Categories

Using a loose grouping method based on my tagging, I found a few other themes in the comments. They exposed some interesting trends, so they’re worth sharing, too:

Feature-itis

I broke out a new category centered around feature-itis, also know as layering on more requests in the middle of development. A handful of comments condemned the same thing: somebody selecting a specific technology-base, regardless of whether it solves the problem at hand. Other comments included classics like adding in untrained resources late in the game and chasing every customer request without filtering them. I counted 10 comments centered around feature-itis, but a handful of others could apply, too, like scope-creep and “Not Knowing What You Want Until You See It (NKWYWUYSI)”, as volunteered by Minaki Serinde. It’s a well-known problem.

“This Here is a Run-Out-the-Clock Situation”

Another major, striking trend in comments was what I call “run out the clock”. This happens when a project is so bad, it is better to keep pushing it slowly along until all interested give up than deal with correcting direction. Like Sisyphus, I suppose. Some people suggested you could run out the clock by over-engineering or over-documenting things, or by taking feature-itis to an extreme. Others suggested that this process could also be fragmented across multiple releases, which might be even more terrifying.

Seagull Management

“The seagull manager flies in, makes a lot of noise, craps on everything then flies off again leaving a big mess behind” —the urban dictionary

There’s not much to say about seagull management, other then comments citing seagull management generated some great visuals, like whack-a-mole and a decapitated chicken. Enough said.

Fatalism

On the bitter side of things, a small collection of comments referred to development teams working on a project with a visible executioners axe hovering just overhead. Yuck. All three development style titles are wonderfully colorful, so I’m going to include them:

• Dead Man Walking Development (DMWD), by Bill
• You’ll Be Gone, I’ll Be Gone (YBG IBG), by Connor Murphy
• Irrelevant Development (And We Know It), by Lynn Cherny

Just Lousy Management

The largest theme of all was bad management techniques at play, with nearly 20 entries. Maybe I could have been more granular, but the centered around budget myopia, aiming only for “low-hanging fruit”, cheap hiring/staffing plans, selling the product before building it, absenteeism³ and—my favorite—the classic “too many chiefs, not enough indians” (which got 3 entries alone…it’s a cliché because it’s true). Out of the wide variety of descriptions of such problems, one deserves special mention for its amazing sagacity: “Can’t Polish a Turd (CPT)”, volunteered by John. I’d explain, but any explanation I could give really would just dumb it down.

Bad management did include one shocking development style, volunteered by Terry Bleizeffer. Terry wrote:

”…you’ve forgotten a biggie—Learned Helplessness Development—in which team members have been beaten down for so long that they assume that no matter what they do, they’ll suffer because of it. It’s the result of frequent and random negative reinforcement combined with infrequent and random positive reinforcement.”

A list like this is bound to bring out humorists, cynics and satirists alike. But sometimes an underlying distress rises to the surface, which is exactly why I think these kinds of lists are so valuable. Terry’s got a point, and shines a small light toward a dark corner of the tech industry. (You’ll no doubt find more commentary about the psychological problems of the tech industry here on Lost Cog in the near future.)

Egomania

The last major theme I found that is worth reporting is egomania-related development styles. They come in two types: a rockstar developer who carries the team in times of dire need, or the “rockstar” developer known as the teacher’s pet behind his or her back. They’re really so simple I don’t have much to add. Having briefly worked with just such a rockstar, I remember the look of dread in his eyes when we’d approach as a team. No amount of apologizing can cover for his lack of a social life.

Footnotes

¹ This is by no means a formal count. I fully admit I probably missed a few, and my groupings are based on my own readings, not some objective method. I also skipped a few I found hard to understand.

² Yeah, you could argue subsequent comments matched because to the “power of suggestion” or other psych-study biases, but, c’mon now. I’m not attempting scientific methodology here, and Scott’s a very smart man—an expert in the area of project management. He nailed them.

³ “All-But-Vacuum Management” was my own addition to the list, wherein management basically offers no guidance until they feel the need to sweep in and do something pointlessly drastic. Like seagull management, but with even less management.