Because the killer app is us.

Ghent altarpiece. Hubert and/or Jan Van Eyck, c. 1430.

One of the mistakes I made early on in my career was to believe that if I had some great accomplishments that I would gain success, including things like money and community respect. This is clearly false, and I’ve recently had a series of communications with an organizational thinker that confirms it.

But first let’s look at some of the comments I’ve gotten from a recent Facebook update about just this point.

My initial comment was simple:

Accomplishing great things is one of the surest ways to become a failure.

One of the commenters told of his own experience from one year to the next:

Two years ago I got some stuff done, but I apparently ticked off some self-important tit with a lack of kowtowing. Last year I did almost nothing and interacted with almost no one. Performance reviews: 2yrs ago Acceptable; last year Good “showing real interpersonal skill improvement.”

Another sensed that not everyone was getting what I was saying. He told of an example from a place of prior employment where someone accomplished something game-changing, and then got fired.

An example of what Forrest is saying:

The head of the computer systems group at my old company was driven and visionary. In the late ’90s, he put us to work developing a flight simulator computing platform that could run on a $4000 PC server instead of a $60,000 special-purpose computer. It opened the door to desktop trainers that could run the same software as the $15 million full-flight sims. 10 years later that architecture is still in use.

As for him, he was canned a couple of years after his new system was first fielded. An issue involving a subcontractor’s source code was the pretext for firing him, but it seemed specious to me. He had stepped on a lot of toes and set a high standard for diligence and energy that not everyone in the company wanted to meet.

What in the world is going on? [Read more →]

The University of Kent is reporting a forthcoming research article by UK social psychologist Mario Weick and Ana Guinote of University College London on how feeling powerful affects one’s estimates. The more people felt powerful, the more optimistic their completion dates were. And it’s not just a small effect: “power drastically reduced the accuracy of forecasts with error rates soaring up to 70%.”

This isn’t really all that surprising of a finding. Powerful people tend to be more optimistic. When you make people feel powerless, they become more pessimistic. Optimists have long been noted to be lousy planners.

Except when you follow optimists over the long haul, as I noted some time back. In an earlier study of MBA students, “optimists” (whom you would expect to be tightly coupled with “feeling powerful”) had lousy initial estimates of their performance (again, which you would expect to be tightly coupled with “time estimates”). But these folks got better as they got feedback and information. On the other hand, “pessimists” had good initial understanding of their performance but got worse as time went on.

Time, as our good friend Elliott Jaques always insisted, must always be a part of your thinking.

A tweet from Jane Hadfield some months back mentioned a then recent post by Cynicus Economicus, who asks “So what exactly is this optimism [about the economy] all about?” His answers are interesting, and reminded me about something I wanted to talk about here regarding jobs and the idea of anchoring.

He notes that there is very little to really be happy about. Yet people are talking as if things are turning around and the risk is behind us. What’s going on?

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I’m off in the Northwest this week, working with a startup I’m helping out in Vancouver. I took the flight to Seattle and rented a car, deciding that in the end it was still a sight cheaper and I’d be able to hit both cities in one trip. We’ve decided to relocate the businesses out to this region, so I’m also out here investigating how Seattle works. Northern Indiana, for all it’s charms, has been rather dismal for my business; all my clients have come from other areas of the country, or out of it.

As the planed started its descent, the guy sitting in the row with me started up a conversation. He had overheard that I was a consultant in safety and was in energy, the oil/gas/coal type. (I’m an EPA-certified trainer, and do Lead Safe Practices classes for renovators for the April 22 deadline, in addition to all the other things my company does.) He was doing some fascinating, game-changing projects, and it turned out that he ran a capital firm in BC. We ended up stopping our talk about half an hour after we had made it to baggage claim.

Fun for me, of course, but what was really interesting what that we touched on Hidden High Potentials.

He knows what you are. And he wants you.

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As I continue my exploration of Christian church organization, specifically focusing on U.S. evangelicals, I need to make something clear from the outset: There is no single, perfect organizational model for all churches.

You would think that this is obvious but it’s not. It’s not even obvious in business management. Elliott Jaques’s ideas of Real Boss and work levels is brilliant but he got into some massive problems insisting that every organization he saw needed to be a Management Accountability Hierarchy. Not even all business organizations need it. You can be a genius and still be blinded by your way of seeing things, which I pointed out in our discussion of Warren Kinston & Jimmy Algie’s seven decision making approaches.

So it’s probably a good idea for us to get this in early.

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Calculated Risk has posted a couple of interesting graphs showing the variance in the lengths of unemployment over the last 40 years (U.S. only). It’s what I’ve been saying: you don’t want to go unemployed these days because those without jobs aren’t going to get new ones.

CR’s points are worth noting:

… if the level of normal turnover was the same as in the ’80s, the current unemployment rate would probably be the highest since WWII.

CR also seems to be bullish on the double-dipping recession hitting this year. I’m anticipating another drop but I’ve still not bothered to run the numbers to see what the likely bottom is.

Megachurch service. Note vid screens and extensive stage with large band.

Photo by ori/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

This starts my new thing on Evangelical church organization. If you’re not interested in American Evangelicals, you may be lost.

Megachurches are most highly liturgical of any church. Those with televised satellite churches are even more so.

Confused? Thought that megachurches eschewed liturgy for free and loose? Here’s why I say this.

Liturgy is the branding of the church of the middle ages. If you went to another town, you could be assured that the church there would be following the same procedures, same church service organization and the same words. There was really very little that was different. Homilies or sermons may be different but the readings, the songs, the chants, the refrains — all of this was the same.

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A board that is probably not going to have these problems

Reviewed: Rakesh Khurana & Katharina Pick. 2005. “The Social Nature of Boards” [PDF]. Brooklyn Law Review, 70(4): 1259-1285.

Back in 2005, the Brooklyn Law Review published the papers from the Corporate Misbehavior by Elite Decision-Makers Symposium, which Brooklyn Law School apparently held. Harvard’s Rakesh Khurana & Katharina Pick contributed a social-psychological look at how boards of directors of corporations can go wrong through social or group processes and how the current spate of “control the directors” changes have missed the boat by concentrating on the role of the individual.

The article is interesting because we all see these types of group dynamics. They appear in many places, including in Church Boards (non-clergy who have an oversight role over the clergy).

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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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[I continue my notes on Kinston & Algie's decision systems.]

As we continue with our exploration of the seven approaches to decision making that were originally developed by Jimmy Algie, reformulated by he and Warren Kinston, then extended by Warren [refs follow below], keep in mind that they can also be seen in two other ways.

Languages of Achievement: The words and syntax you use to talk about getting something done, how even your group should achieve a goal. Even when talking about getting to the same goal, people using two different approaches will argue endlessly about the approach.

Action Path: The way or path that you take in order to achieve your goal. This is why the decision approach is so important: it’s not just how you think but how you take action to achieve or solve a problem.

The Imaginist / Initutionist Decision Making Approach

The Imaginist (sometimes “intuitionist”) decision-making approach is normally thought of as the Creative one. The reason is that it works by imagining new things. It’s focus is on internal experiences. This approach emphasizes vision and charismatic leadership. Imaginists succeed when the issue isn’t clear, when things are confused. These are people who lead you out of a fog of confusion by describing something that doesn’t exist.

Examples of Imaginist include Jim McCarthy’s Software for Your Head: Core Protocols for Creating and Maintaining Shared Vision
, Dan Pink’s “right-brain revolution”, most of Peter Block’s The Answer To How Is Yes, and most of the “find your inner compass” people. Many of these people come out of Empiricist-dominated fields. McCarthy ran the team at Microsoft that developed the software that developers use to create software. My old high-school lab partner became an electrical engineer and is now a “passion expert” with a thriving private practice. They see the degeneration of their Empiricist values and look for something that can be more.

That something is the Imaginist system.

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One of my friends suggested that I check out the pilot for the 2009 TV series called Being Erica from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). She thought that it had a lot of ties to things that I had discussed.

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From “How Companies Spend Their Money” [PDF] (McKinsey Global Survey)

A survey of executives from around the world highlights how frequently — and why — a company’s resource allocation decisions go wrong.

Companies start off well, respondents say: senior executives are heavily involved in these decisions and routinely assess the prior performance of business units and the value creation protential of proposed projects, among other critera.

However, respondents also describe a climate in which optimistic forecasts are coupled with risk aversion. Companies can also be deliberately led astray: more than a third say that executives hide, restrict, or misrepresent information when requesting funds.

I found this interesting enough to link to it but I don’t have time to comment. Perhaps someone else can explain why how we have come to expect and embrace unethical behaviour from executives (e.g., “misrepresent information”). I’m betting that Michelle Carter has a insightful answer about being non-requisite and these shenanigans.

I’ve been reading Jim McCarthy’s materials lately. He used to be in charge of the Visual C++ group at Microsoft. His work there was nothing short of phenomenal: MS-VC++ came out of nowhere and demolished its long-time rival. Sure, MS has scads of cash but that wasn’t the whole picture. Borland went from 85% marketshare to nothing in a very short time because McCarthy’s team had put together a product that users wanted to use. We can argue over whether that produced good software (I’ve suffered years of putting up with VC++ programmers who didn’t understand the basics any better than I did, and I was management) but it did sell. And sell extremely well.

Lately, McCarthy and his wife, Michelle McCarthy, have been pushing The Core and its accompanying Core Commitments. I enjoyed the McCarthy’s rules for developing successfully, but this is ridiculous. It’s like he started going through an encounter group and decided that all relationships should be run with such artifice.

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Empiricists love data. Lots of data.

Warren Kinston and Jimmy Algie posited that there are seven, and only seven, unique mindsets or approaches humans use when making decisions about action. This is conscious decision, not simply unconscious reaction based on stimula-response.I’ve got the full article available, although the quality is wanting. (See [2])

Warren Kinston and Jimmy Algie weren’t a couple of bumblers: Algie had been looking at this since the 1970s and Kinston had, too, albeit from a different angle. Their work together extended Algie’s original work of four approaches and was based on extensive experience consulting with managers and professionals in commerce and medicine, and through many open workshops where the decision methods were taught and tested.

I’m going to be describing each different decision approach over the next few weeks as a I prep for some other work I’m doing.

Each approach has specific mindset and values that make it uniquely appropriate for certain types of problems. Adherents to a particular type (and we are all) believe that their favored approach works in all situations. But it doesn’t.

Decision making approaches can also be seen as “languages of achievement” [1] because it is through them that we act. We make decisions about action.

Many of our disagreements in meetings and even families can be seen as disagreements about how to decide, rather than the action itself.

Also, I will just note here something Warren has pointed out several times: your decision making language seems to be doing the work. If I know your dominant decision approach, I can predict with uncanny accuracy how you will approach the problem and what decisions you will make. It is almost as if we are simply channels for the approach. Knowing more about them can make this not true, so this is worth looking at.

(Let’s be clear here that I am writing up what I think is true. Warren wrote things up quite differently, and I need to translate what I have read and heard into my own words. I am likely introducing some error in my efforts to bring this to a larger audience, so feel free to comment.)

Here’s the first decision making approach.

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Here’s a good lesson demonstrating why you need native speakers to help you write your materials when working abroad, especially in non-Western languages. The illustration comes from the other way around, the world’s largest bank.

This is ICBC China’s attempt at English in an official recruiting site:

Our leading enterprise needs excellent talent, and excellent talent also looks forward to joining a leading team…. Detailed enrollment information, please refer to our website: www.icbc.com.cn. ICBC would like to be hand in hand with you, to develop our business and also help to achieve your personal value.

Yes, this seems to be real. You can’t make this stuff up.

This is so bad that I wonder if non-native speakers could properly parse its meaning.

Language mangling like this occurs all the time when people use computer translators, like Babel Fish or Google Translate. It should not be so obvious when they use human translators.

ICBC China would have done better to have used a two-step translation process, where the first pass is done by a real translator, and the second by a native-speaking professional writer to ensure that it makes sense in International English. As it is, it just makes them look like they aren’t even trying. Perhaps there are not that many proficient English speakers in Chinese banking, unlike their Hong Kong counterparts. It makes the ICBC look as provincial as many US-based banks, whose staff often speak nothing more than English.

Writers are paid because they understand how to use language more effectively than you do. (Disclosure: I have been a professional writer.) Skimping on language is much like having your IT support being done by your office manager: it can work, but it is usually less robust than having dedicated staff, especially in larger organizations.

You’ll have to follow the money

Did you know that if you start work during a recession, you are likely to never make as much as someone who started working during good times? This is probably not news to you: Forbes and the Wall Street Journal both covered this back before the class of 2009 graduated in May.

It turns out that economic research showed that people who graduate during a depression not only make less money when they come out, because the market is depressed and jobs are scarce, but they continue to make less for years to come and may never catch up with people who are exactly like them but graduated a couple of years earlier during a run-up. Even when times get better, they still earn less money for the same jobs.

The reasons for this should be obvious, but that hasn’t stopped people from continuing to spout useless claptrap.

For example, Forbes’s David Serchuk (“How To Graduate In A Recession”, 2009 April 16) wrote that:

Having the bad luck to graduate in a recession can mark someone’s entire career, as it can lead workers to start careers at smaller firms that pay less….

[S]ometimes having your plans shattered can bring you to make a career out of what you’d really like to do with your life, as opposed to simply chasing the money.

John Osborne, later in the article, said that

Graduating into a recession or a Great Recession or whatever we are calling it is a great gift, a real blessing in disguise. Why? For two simple reasons: You are learning in dog years (one year equals seven years of experience), and you are getting more experience since you are more actually valuable.

If your Bullshit Detector hasn’t already gone off, it should. Forbes, of course, doesn’t make money by telling people the truth which is why they seemed blissfully unaware of the impending crash even though everyone knew that it was coming. These are nice thoughts but they clearly aren’t true, or at least aren’t true for the vast majority of graduates.

To see why this is bullshit, we need to look at why recession-era graduates will make less, even after the recovery.

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