Featherbedding

by jonathan on October 28, 2009

“Featherbedding is a pejorative term for the practice of hiring more workers than are needed to perform a given job, or to adopt work procedures which appear pointless, complex and time-consuming merely to employ additional workers. The term “make-work” is sometimes used as a synonym for featherbedding.

The term “featherbedding” is usually used by management to describe behaviors and rules sought by workers. But featherbedding has also been occasionally used to describe rent-seeking behavior by corporations in response to economic regulation. The term may equally apply to mid- and upper-level management, particularly in regard to top-heavy and “bloated” levels of middle- and upper-level management.”

Featherbedding – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Rave Review for Change By Design

by jonathan on September 28, 2009

Bob Sutton notes a rave review of EDEO CEO Tim Brown’s new book “Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation“. Bob writes:

The review, called “Redefining a Profession,” concludes that Tim has successfully avoided one of the biggest risks in a book like this one – coming across as too much of a commercial for the firm he leads.  Tim accomplishes this by simply being himself, and indeed, when I read the galleys, that was my comment…”This is 100% Tim Brow.,”  In any conversation you have with Tim, he will do things that many CEOs do not, he will give others lots of credit, he will tell wonderful stories, talk honestly about what works and what doesn’t, and about the limits of the methods used by his company, not just the strengths.  Indeed, for me, as much as I am a big believer in the power of design thinking, after hanging around the Stanford d school for five years or so, although I believe we teach our students well, I am often disturbed because “design thinking” is treated as the answer to every problem and also as more like a religion than a set of practices for sparking creativity.  Tim and his many colleagues at IDEO have had the courage to apply design thinking to almost any problem – from designing better websites, to changing how programmers work together, designing a couple thousand products, revamping operations, and changing customers experiences.   In doing so they have simultaneously pushed the limits of design thinking beyond what others thought possible (hence the title “Redefining a  Profession”) while always acknowledging the limits of the approach.

via Rave Review for Change By Design in New York Times.

The New York Times article is “Redefining a Profession“

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50 more ways to improve your business

by jonathan on September 27, 2009

Master consultant and all round business genius Gerald Wienberg has sorted the best of Jerry Weinberg’s (no relation) “50 things to improve business”:

2. back up everything

4. Rule: do nothing, revised with 3 caveats: a) don’t do it if there’s someone that can do it better; b) don’t do it if there’s someone that can do it adequately; c) if it makes me really happy, do it anyway; d) if someone can do it 85% as well as I do, let them do it; e) anything not worth doing is not worth doing right; f) if in doubt charge for sales trips

6. make them pay something, with their time, their money — if they don’t pay for it they don’t value it

8. if it’s not on paper, don’t do it

9. listen to what other people are telling you

10. don’t communicate to somebody, but communicate with somebody

11. always have an exit strategy

12. make them feel like your client has a part in the final outcome; make sure they have their fingerprints on it

13. listen for what they’re not saying

14. listen to the “music”, body language, intonation

15. always be ready to sell your product

16. if you find yourself reluctant to sell your product, there’s something wrong with it

17. any successful services company has some fixed priced product to sell

18. given them entry points that they can buy

19. recurring revenue model, e.g. via contract maintenance plans, or follow-through

20. have a follow-through clause in contract so you can know how you’re doing

21. charge more money if they don’t want you to come back after some time, e.g. 3 months

22. if you just build it they probably won’t come

23. manage expectations, book: Managing Expectations, by Naomi Karten

24. Time spent in reconnaissance is time well spent

25. You can observe a whole lot just by watching (Yogi Berra)

26. Go hard or go home; fully commit all resources needed, or kill it mercilessly

27. Commit enough to learn what you have to learn to find out whether it’s worth pursuing or killing

28. People who work in an Agile/iterative way often fail to do the discovery

29. Ideas by themselves aren’t as valuable as you think they are; don’t guard them too closely

30. Nothing is as dangerous as an idea, esp. if it’s the only idea you have

31. Never rest on your past successes; there is always something more you could be doing; if you’re not learning, you’re dead

32. Sharing competitive advantages brings 10-fold rewards; give it away, it comes back

33. Being able to say ‘no’

34. Research clients as if you were hiring them

35. Recognize that every client is unique.

36. You don’t have to remember everything to succeed.

37. It’s ok to let a client go if it’s not the right fit; you should organize your business such that it’s ok to let a client go, i.e. don’t be over-dependent on any single client

38. The best way to build a business is to stay in business; stay around, build a reputation and credibility

39. Actively solicit feedback from clients; actively extract the feedback, e.g. watch the audience

40. Don’t be alone in your work; have someone to talk to

41. Honor the people who are your sounding board and bring feedback, e.g. life partners, friends, …

42. Anything that’s annoying or repetitive should be automated or stopped

43. Track your budget & cost every month

44. Don’t make mistakes over your budget or your cost.

45. Don’t spend your money on office decoration, esp. if your clients don’t come to your office

46. Always try someone out before you hire them

47. Don’t fall for the big lies: “we’re just about to get funding” “our data is clean” “your check is in the mail” “we’re going to sign it next month, just keep working” “don’t worry about the contract” …

48. Preventing any one of these mistakes will pay for this conference

49. Double your reading speed

50. Choose not to read a lot; don’t read stuff that’s not worth reading

51. Stay off Facebook & Twitter

52. Sometimes you can save money by spending money; and sometimes the reverse. Learn to tell the difference

via 50 more ways to improve your business.

Also see the original 50 ways to improve your business .

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When Murphy comes calling

by jonathan on July 10, 2009

There is a good article in Projects@Work about what to do when a risk you chose not to mitigate materialises, and how to handle it.

From Projects@Work – A Guy Named Murphy:

Widely accepted risk management theory says that doing nothing is an appropriate response to some risks. But what happens on a project when you’ve done no risk mitigation and then the risk materializes?

“When you are running a large project and have already passed the project planning phase, the project manager’s core role is managing the performance of people, meeting plan expectations, and assessing the threats to project success,” say Tim Pare and John Kirkwood, managing consultants at PA Consulting Group. “From a practical point of view, there are always a ton of these threats and there is seldom time available to spend on things that have a low likelihood. It is probably more often the case that risk mitigation activities are curtailed, or not enacted at all, rather than pursued for too long.”

Lisa Anderson, president of LMA Consulting Group, also believes that there’s a natural stop to risk management activity. “I’ve led project teams, it is common to have unexpected events and challenges arise. [But] once you have established an effective project team and defined a critical path, stop risk mitigation activity, as it will be a waste of time and resources,” she says.

In fact, these unexpected events are par for the course in project management. “If you have been a PM for any length of time you have run into problems on your projects — especially if they are IT or technology related,” says Bruce McGraw, CEO of Cognitive Technologies, a professional services firm delivering project and program management services, products and PMO tool implementation to commercial and government clients. “In fact, we blame these problems on a guy named ‘Murphy’ which has led to the whole field of risk management, where we try to think of all the things that can go wrong before a project starts. The first step in addressing the worst case is to determine that you have a problem. That is not always as simple as it seems.”

Johanna Rothman, author of Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management, agrees. As a consultant, she was brought in to help resolve a crisis on a development project where nothing was working and everything had been tried. “[The] project was slipping a week every week,” Rothman says. “The PM had no idea what to do. The project team had no idea. They were trying to integrate a piece of hardware and software, and it wasn’t working.”

Rothman established that the problem they thought they had — no more options — wasn’t actually the real problem. “The developers had been saying ‘We’ve tried everything’ but they hadn’t. The testers were saying ‘We’ve tested everything’ but they hadn’t. I had them build a matrix of everything they’d tried and the results they’d gotten. Once they realized there were holes in the matrix where things hadn’t been tried, they knew how long those tasks would take and we would have another chance to reassess after those tasks were done.”

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What you really do with OODA loops

by jonathan on June 30, 2009

These are some selections and notes from a brilliant essay by Dr Chester W Richards about OODA loops and the general application of military know how to business. From “What you really do with OODA loops” :

The key to the military notion of time lies in how practitioners of the art of war view strategy. Great commanders down through the years have used time-based strategy to cloud their opponents’ understanding and destroy their morale so that the battle, if it must be fought at all, is relatively quick and painless. In the language of conflict, we say that they move their opponents where they want them to be. Leaders in business and industry can do the same thing and with similar results. This paper explores this notion, first by looking at what today’s most avant-garde business theorists claim for the concept of time, and then comparing that to what the most successful generals and strategists aim to achieve. Finally, we will the translate the military goals and objectives back into the commercial world and look for examples where it actually worked.

…Building one new business after another, faster than the competition, is the only way to stay ahead.

…a real strategist doesn’t like words like “respond” and is dubious about “anticipate.” These are passive sorts of things…

Now it is true that fast reactions have their place – if your opponent catches you by surprise, for example. Competence in this tactic, such things as staying cool, using the other side’s momentum against them, and so on, form an essential part of any competitor’s tool kit. Problems arise when, as in the above paradigm, reaction becomes the goal of strategy. First, under such an arrangement, if we don’t see anything, we don’t do anything. So much for initiative.

[click to continue…]

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Elliot Jaques and Requisite Organisation

by jonathan on June 15, 2009

From the Economist’s Guru section article on Elliott Jaques:

Jaques (1917-2003) decided that jobs could be defined in terms of their time horizon. For example, a director of marketing might be worried about marketing campaigns for next year, while a salesman on the road is worried about reaching his targets for the week. Jaques also believed that people had a “boss” and a “real boss”. The boss was the person to whom they were nominally responsible, while the real boss was the person to whom they turned to get decisions crucial to the continuation of their work.

The sales manager in charge of a salesforce would not have a longer time horizon than the people in his salesforce. So when a salesman wanted a decision on something affecting his ability to deliver to his clients, he would go over the head of the sales manager for that decision. Jaques called this “level skipping”, and identified it as a dangerous pathology in any hierarchy.

He then looked at the time horizons of people, their bosses and their real bosses, and he found that people with a time horizon of less than three months treated those with a horizon of 3–12 months as their real bosses, and so on up the scale. He identified seven different time horizons, from three months to 20 years, and argued that organisations, no matter how complex, should have seven levels of hierarchy, each corresponding to a different managerial time horizon. Jaques’s theory has come to be known as RO (requisite organisation).

This reminds me of the Tolstoy quotation from C.S. Lewis’s “The Inner Ring”:

“When Boris entered the room, Prince Andrey was listening to an old general, wearing his decorations, who was reporting something to Prince Andrey, with an expression of soldierly servility on his purple face. “Alright. Please wait!” he said to the general, speaking in Russian with the French accent, which he used when he spoke with contempt. The moment he noticed Boris he stopped listening to the general who trotted imploringly after him and begged to be heard, while Prince Andrey turned to Boris with a cheerful smile and a nod of the head. Boris now clearly understood-what he had already guessed-that side by side with the system of discipline and subordination which were laid down in the Army Regulations, there existed a different and a more real system-the system which compelled a tightly laced general with a purple face to wait respectfully for his turn while a mere captain like Prince Andrey chatted with a mere second lieutenant like Boris, Boris decided at once that he would be guided not by the official system but by this other unwritten system.”

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Some great book combinations

by jonathan on June 12, 2009

Here are a few books that compliment each other wonderfully:

“Getting Things Done” and “Getting It Done”

“McMafia” and “Illicit”

“Nudge” and “Influencer” and “Yes”

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Bookmarks for May 28th 2009 through June 11th 2009

by jonathan on June 11, 2009

These are my links for May 28th 2009 through June 11th 2009:

  • The dark side of Dubai – The Independent – Dubai was meant to be a Middle-Eastern Shangri-La, a glittering monument to Arab enterprise and western capitalism. But as hard times arrive in the city state that rose from the desert sands, an uglier story is emerging.

  • The Atlantic Online | June 2006 | The Management Myth | Matthew Stewart – Most of management theory is inane, writes our correspondent, the founder of a consulting firm. If you want to succeed in business, don’t get an M.B.A. Study philosophy instead

  • BBC NEWS | Business | Irish Republic: Boom to bust – BBC radio look at the complete collapse of the Irish economy and how the Irish emigrant is back.

  • Why Things Become Unpopular – "Why is everybody suddenly wearing those new sandals and listening to that new band? It's so trendy!" A recent study has investigated this sentiment in order to understand why some cultural products and styles die out faster than others. According to the results, the quicker a cultural item rockets to popularity, the quicker it dies. This pattern occurs because people believe that items that are adopted quickly will become fads, leading them to avoid these items, thus causing these items to die out.

  • A List Apart: Articles: Burnout – "Web professionals are often expected to be “always on”—always working, absorbing information, and honing new skills. Unless our work and personal lives are carefully balanced, however, the physical and mental effects of an "always on" life can be debilitating."

  • In the industrial economy success was self-limiting; – …it obeyed the law of decreasing returns. In the network economy, success is self-reinforcing; it obeys the law of increasing returns.

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Brilliant summary of best persuasion tips

by jonathan on May 31, 2009

[Originally published at Limbicnutrition.com]

Alex Moskalyuk has distilled the entirely of the book “Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive” by Cialdini et al into a single blog post.

It really does get in the best of them, including tips I recognise from recent the persuasion best-seller “Nudge” by  Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein.

Read on for this superb list:  Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive « alex.moskalyuk

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Rules of Thumb

by jonathan on May 31, 2009

Steve Roesler of All Things Workplace, one of the most dependable book recommenders I know of, gives “Rules of Thumb” a rave review in a recent post on his blog.

The subtitle lives up to its words: “52 Truths For Winning At Business Without Losing Your Self”.

You
don’t see many book reviews here even though we receive many
promotional copies. I do look hard at each one but, given my own
business and personal priorities, I only write a review when it’s a
raving recommendation, like: Rules of Thumb: 52 Truths for Winning at Business Without Losing Your Self

Get it over at: Amazon.com

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