Issue 33, Thursday 30 November, 2000
Made in New Zealand - twice winners of the America's Cup
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Made in New Zealand - twice winners of the America's Cup
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Award is a free fortnightly email magazine featuring the tools, techniques and best-practices that deliver high performance in the new economy
In this issue
WarmUp – Managing (dis)stress ... is big business
Five Minute MasterClass – Quality in the new economy - revisted!
Quick Case Study – Managing software engineers - or herding cats
Sixty Second Snapshots
>> HOLIDAY CHEER
>> 360 DEGREE APPRAISAL
>> VALUES FOR MANAGEMENT
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Managing (dis)stress
Managing stress is big business.
- HR in-trays overflow with sales pitches – everything from good advice to hands-on assistance.
- One of the drivers of the flourishing coaching business is the need to deal with stress, and the difficulty we all have doing it on our own.
It's recently been the subject of an active and interesting strand in the UKHRD a British training-related on-line discussion list. Here's the essence of a contribution by Maurice Hogarth.
I used – long ago – to actually suffer from morning sickness, he wrote, and the diagnosis from a psychiatrist was “This man is sick – of his job”. Understandably this gave Maurice pause (and caused him to change his job), and here, some time later and after a lot of thought and experience, are his conclusions about life, work and stress:
We exist within three domains (work, home, social).
- to maintain a balanced and healthy life-form/style, and to help cope with stress, get these domains in balance.
Pressure is OK:
- Pressure (whether from internal motivation or external leadership) causes us to do things . Above the norm – but within our capacity to be successful at what we are doing – it's stressful, but may be sought because it gives as a high.
But distress is not: - When pressure becomes too great or too little (and the threshold varies from person to person and from situation to situation in relation) or it relates to things that we are not motivated to do, then stress (distortion, the twisting of the individual's mental set due to incompatibility between required outputs and available resources for example) is created.
- Maurice calls the mental (psychological) and/or physical (physiological) impact of too much stress distress.
- It's not necessarily over-work that causes distress. It may also be the lack of appropriate resources and management – causing tension-torsion conflict between motivation to deliver and restrictions on the capacity to do so.
How to respond to distressing situations:
- Remove the cause. Improve work, home and social cultures, maybe through a more rational approach to management. We cannot, however, remove real stressors, he says – those aspects of a job which by their nature are intrinsically traumatic (if you're a policeperson, fire-fighter or ambulance and medical staff, for example)
- Develop external strength or armour – off which the slings and arrows bounce. They may not hurt as much but we will still feel them and there will be an effect upon us. To deal with these effects takes us into the field of techniques – to do with assertiveness or diet and fitness (including the superficial physical aspects of martial arts), to do with living accommodation layout and colouring – to do with 'body-power' relaxing, refreshing, recreation and renewing … all help get rid of the shallower impacts or the aspects of stress that are above the water-line to use to use an iceberg analogy.
- Develop inner strength or energy – becoming 'insubstantial', or rising above, so that the slings and arrows pass below or through us without hurt, without triggering mental/physical distress. This takes us into the field of self awareness and inner harmony, and into the area of self confidence, self esteem, and so on.
The second level or deep level (psychological) mental aspects of Yoga, and the various forms of meditation and martial arts. This is to do with mind-power and re-creation. These approaches help us to deal with the deep level, accumulative aspects of stress (the part of the iceberg below the water).
Even if we could remove all of the stressors of life (which is unrealistic and would undoubtedly be unhealthy) there would still be benefits in developing competences in the other areas. There is no one-right-answer. Individuals are different in temperament, therefore different in their responses to situations and so need different patterns of responding to the distressing situations in their lives.
A fundamental or foundation approach to self and life management is summarised by some very early Buddhist writings, Maurice says, these stated that '...individuals need to learn to breathe correctly, to walk correctly, to think correctly and to fight correctly'.
Five minute MasterClass® – Quality in the new economy - revisted!
This article has been around for a while (so long that the original version pre-dated the April 2000 NASDAQ correction … we were spot on, by the way, market fundamentals have come 'roaring back,' and the disbelief turned out to be suspended very temporarily!).
So here's our late Y2K take on the place of quality in the dot-com/new-economy world:
Internet and e-commerce markets are rapidly becoming very crowded and significantly more 'international.' Everywhere, regulators are struggling to keep up. That means greater risk and uncertainty for customers.
An explosion in domain-name registrations, and the late but enthusiastic arrival of the old bricks and mortar crowd – re-purposed in their best new-economy clothes – suggests that standing out from the crowd will become harder for everyone, but particularly for new entrants and smaller organizations.
Dot-com pixie dust and first-mover advantage are no longer sufficient. The magic has gone (it disappeared in the April 2000 shakeout) and an increasing focus on the elements of a quality organisation is no longer an option – it's essential. As in the old economy, quality will be a key differentiator.
What is 'quality' in this new economy?
Brilliant leadership, effective strategy, unrelenting attention to customers and markets, the recruitment, training and retention of exemplary staff, process superiority, good use of data, and great results.
The top five elements to dot-com quality:
(1) Customer experience - great customer experiences develop your brand, increase loyalty and grow revenues. Many users still find the internet an intimidating, foreign environment – but if customers and users love your site and enjoy using it, they will stick, and return;
(2) Leadership and strategy - from the success stories which are endlessly dissected in business and internet literature, some general principles are starting to emerge. The need for (and the nature of) leadership changes as dot-coms scale up from good ideas to real businesses. Dot-com leadership is much more about teams and coaching than about profile and stature. The heroic leader is a dinosaur;
(3) Mobility - 'internet time' may be a cliché, but moving quickly is a core capability which will require robust and fast-track processes and a bullet-proof new product introduction;
(4) Ethics and privacy - getting ethics 'wrong' can cripple a business and may soon expose it to government regulation and severe legal sanctions. Trust is key – it can be established quickly, and disappear just as fast;
(5) Results - investors may have been prepared to suspend their disbelief before April, but as soon as the e-boom faltered, 'market fundamentals' came roaring back. Delivering profits – or a robust route to profitability – is now a given.
Quick Case Study® – Managing Software Engineers
On-line newsletter Slashdot recently published Managing Software Engineers, which we recommend to any readers who wonder what's different about techies, and why managing them is a bit like herding cats ... here's what slashdot's Philip Greenspun (philg@mit.edu) had (in part) to say.
Software engineering is different:
- ... because only the best people significantly contribute to achievement. Traditional management texts assume a distribution of talent among the workers
- ... because people at all levels of the organization perceive themselves to be equally intelligent. Consensus-style management can perhaps work when there is a gradient of perceived ability. Given enough time, the less able workers will follow the lead of the more able workers
- ... because a leaf-node worker is more expert than any manager, even when the manager is a great engineer, in at least the small portion of the system that the leaf-node worker has personally built. ...
- ... because the organization can't afford to lose the individual productivity of the best people by pushing them into management. A truly great programmer may generate 10 times as much business value as a merely good programmer.
A product is going to get out the door much faster if it is built by 4 people working 70-hour weeks (180 productive programmer-hours per week, after subtracting for 25 hours of coordination and structure comprehensiontime) than if by 12 people working 40-hour weeks (the same net of 180 hours per week). The 12-person team will inevitably require additional managers and all-day meetings to stay coordinated.
Your business success will depend on the extent to which programmers essentially live at your office. For this to be a common choice, your office had better be nicer than the average programmer's home.
How can an office be nicer than one's home? Let's consider the following dimensions:
- physical comfort
- aesthetic
- entertainment
- attractive
It is easy to make an office more entertaining than the average person's home. Most people have a TV at home but they don't have friends with whom to watch it. Nor will they typically have the kind of big-screen equipment that is easy for a company to acquire.
In the 1980s students at the MIT Media Lab would gather on quite a few nights to watch movies from analog laserdisks, presented with a very high quality projector. After the movie was over, they'd go back to their desks and work for a few hours, something that would not have happened if they'd gone out to the movies. The average home cannot accommodate a pinball machine. An office can. The average home can have video games, which are very popular with young programmers, but not people with whom to play. The average home cannot have a grand piano but almost any office can.
Change of Venue. You can work on all of the preceding dimensions but there will come a day when a programmer gets restless. Sitting at exactly the same desk every day is tedious.
What does it take to let the entire team pick up and work somewhere else for awhile? A beach house or a ski house within a two-hour drive of their main office. It is kind of expensive for an individual to rent a vacation house year-around, equip it with a DSL line or cable modem, and pack it with enough desks and computers for a team to work.
But if you've got a group of 30 programmers and get a house large enough for 6 or so to sleep and work, the cost is manageable. In the winter, a programming team can disappear for a week, ski every morning and work all afternoon and evening. In the summer, a team can spend a week looking out at the ocean... while typing most of the time. It costs more than not having the beach house but a lot less than having employees go off on their own to have fun every weekend and not work.
These principles are important in building up someone's programming skills:
1. A person won't become proficient at something until he or she has done it many times. In other words, if you want someone to be really good at building a software system, he or she will have to have built 10 or more of that type.
2. A person won't retain proficiency at a task unless he or she has at one time learned to perform that task very rapidly. Learning research demonstrates that the skills of people who become accurate but not fast deteriorate much sooner than the skills of people who become both accurate and fast.
3.Technology shifts force a programmer to go through bursts of learning every year or two.
Whatever the training task, the pace must be ruthlessly brisk. The learner should be expected to build at the same pace as an experienced developer. The difference between the learner and the wizard is that you expect the learner to make a lot of mistakes. The system as built may be awkward or not handle error cases properly. That's okay. Training research shows that if you get speed now you can get quality later [!!].
If you see one of your best people walking out the door at 6pm, try to think why you haven't challenged that person with an interesting project. If you see one of your average programmers walking out the door at 6pm, recognize that this person is not developing into a good programmer. An average programmer's productivity will never be significant in a group of good programmers. If you care about profits, you must either come up with a new training program for the person or figure out the best way to terminate his or her employment with your organization.
Sixty second snapshots®
Brutally short summaries of material too valuable to junk
SSS 1 – HOLIDAY CHEER
Although analysts are predicting a record year for Internet shopping, a survey commissioned by SuperPages.com, Verizon's online directory service, found that many consumers use the Internet to window-shop - to research and browse for gifts before they buy from local merchants. In fact, 21% of respondents characterize their shopping behavior as researching online and buying locally. Not surprisingly, 65% say they are sticking with the old-fashioned method as their primary form of shopping - researching and buying at a local retailer.
SSS 2 – 360 DEGREE APPRAISAL
For a quick intro to 360 degree appraisal Roger Pattison
SSS 3 – VALUES FOR MANAGEMENT
Michael Gros of the Center for Business Ethics and Social Responsibility at the Jerusalem College of Technology in Israel emailed to say "Thank you very much for mentioning our e-magazine in your recent publication! I had not heard of the Award, but I am very impressed with it. It contains a wealth of good information.
"The Center for Business Ethics and Social Responsibility has produced a second edition of their e-magazine, Values for Management. This issue focuses on Consumer Privacy on the Internet. This issue, and the previous issue focusing on Employee Loyalty in the Hi-Tech World, can be found on the web at: http://members.nbci.com/besr"
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We'd like, as always, to remind you about EDGE FIRST, our companion eZine dedicated to leaders and leadership - a fortnightly serving of provocative thinking about what it means to be a leader, and the tools, techniques and best-practices that drive leadership improvement. If you haven't seen it, click here for a complimentary issue.
In recent issues
Competing for the future - Hamel is THE MAN, embrace innovation!
Women and leadership - for real progress ... give men the nappies
Quick case study/Jennifer White - on picking winning teams
tompeters! - new economy DNA. Flaky? Irresistable! The survival kit
Snapshots of the new economy - from Seybold to Subramanian
eStrategy - best, first, fastest, lastest ... just watch out for Wal-Mart
A better way - but don't try this at home
Gen II - who wants to be a CEO
>> Next issue December 13 - reader contributions warmly received
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