Posts from — February 2010

A friend of mine made up her mind in college that she was going to be a professional singer. She worked hard at it, did the various groups, choirs and solo performances. She even went pro in a little jazz quartet with some others.

After college, she decided to continue her studies and went to a prestigious conservatory in New York City. She worked hard there, too, and was dedicated to the opera career.

Until, while trying to make some money on the side, she landed a leading role in a Broadway revival.

Now, you’ve got to think: here’s someone who has it made in the shade. She’s under 25 and in her first Broadway appearance has a leading role. She’s making money, getting great reviews, and surely the world is her oyster.

And then she got a throat disease that destroyed her singing voice. The end of not only Broadway but any career that required singing.

Sometimes no matter how hard you work, not matter how much you “make things happen”, you still aren’t going to succeed. Life’s like that.

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A few years back, I took on my first ISO 9001 project. An IT outsourcing company, then still in North America, wanted to certify the Desktop Support groups at each outsource contract in the world. You can apparently just do one site and certify the operations everywhere. Upper management gave them 90 days to complete the project. Just one quarter.

The site I was working with got chosen and because I’m too stupid to know that it was impossible, I volunteered to spearhead it for them and make sure it got done.

And we did.

And we got the highest score that the auditor had ever given anyone. Ever.

I mention this partly because I like saying how great I am, but mostly to illustrate an important point that is related to what I talked about last week (“Why There Is Never Going To Be A Silver Bullet“): when you do something head and shoulders better than other people do it, you can tell your Big Secrets to everyone and still be safe in the knowledge that no one will ever be able to compete with you.

The reason is simple: people will not violate what they already think they know to do all the things that you did to succeed.

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There is no single, best way to solve business problems. Or career problems. Or project problems. Or marriage problems. Or any one type of problems.

You’d think that more than two decades after Fred Brooks told us that, at least in software, we would know that there is no silver bullet. The reason is simple:

Life is complex.

Most of the people shilling you an answer don’t even see that their methods or approach is just that: a single approach. They have a particular way of seeing the world and come hell or high-water, you are supposed to follow it.

The problem is that this just doesn’t work.

Why?

Because there is no overarching meta method.

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A friend of mine encouraged me to tell this story which I watched unfold first hand while a software development manager for a mid-sized consulting firm. One of my best developers — a software architect, really — started laughing in the middle of the day. We all needed something to release the strain of our bi-weekly drop work, so all us meerkats gathered around his desk.

“Look at this!” he said, and pointed to some small sort of print that was in an email.

Apparently he had just gotten an unsolicited solicitation to apply for a job doing .NET work. Now at the time .NET was brand new: it had only been officially on the market for some months and it had only been a couple of years since it had started beta.

We all knew this because part of the project was migrating the client to .NET. He had been an early alpha tester, the people who work with software applications before it even gets solid enough to start beta testing. It was an elite group, these .NET alpha testers, and he had bragged a couple of times about it. He quickly reminded us of it again, and then demanded that we look at the advert.

Squinting, we told him that we would prefer him to tell us whatever point he had.

“They say that they’re looking for a .NET developer, which has only been out for a few months now,” he said. “But then they say that they require ‘at least 5 years .NET experience.’

“Even I don’t have five years’ experience. I’m not even sure that the Microsoft engineers who created it have five years.”

Yes indeed, the great “must have experience in something that was just created” strikes again.

If you were wondering why your large institution (bank, insurance firm, governmental agency, etc.) can’t keep it’s computers working, you need look no further than idiots as managers.

It’s inevitable, having an idiot as a manager of technical staff. I’ve been one (both manager and idiot) so I know of which I speak. The trick to being successful is knowing and admitting that you’re an idiot.

Why this is true is something that until now I’ve only described orally to clients. But perhaps it’s worth describing in more detail.

In late November, while talking to my old partner about how the Seven Decision Making Approaches (or “languages of achievement”) are relevant to his current work problems, I suddenly realised something startling. For several years, I have been selling myself as either Imaginist or Empiricist, but delivering Systemicist results. The disconnect has been startling. It cleanly explains many of the issues that I’ve seen over the past eight years since leaving business process design and going into, well, everything else.

There are implications that follow, of course.

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