Monthly Archives: January 2013

On Leadership and Management

Steve Jobs and his Bozo theory

We admire Steve Jobs for what he had accomplished in his relatively short life time. Beyond his talents, we should take a deeper look at his courage. Not many people in the modern time can beat his true courage to stand on his own and not to be fooled by any other.

Forbes magazine published another article by Eric Jackson on “The Ten Life Lessons From Steve Jobs We Should Never Forget”.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2013/01/22/the-ten-life-lessons-from-steve-jobs-we-should-never-forget/print/

It’s amazingly refreshing to notice the 2nd lesson: Don’t tolerate bozos around you. Here is the paragraph:

“Throughout his life, Steve had a great “bozo” detector. He did a super job of not letting bozos proliferate at his companies. He weeded them out if they were there – until they weren’t. You’ll never be perfect at it and neither was Steve but the key thing is that bozos sap energy from you and the best people in the company working with you. Bozos make bozo decisions. Bozos hire worse bozos beneath them. Stamp them out. Don’t let them take root around you.”

For any truly competent people, we can’t agree more on this truth, but very few in our current society besides Steve Jobs had called it out. Don’t we just tolerate bozos a lot more nowadays in the names of team work, collaboration or simply being pleasant?

For company leaders, especially those top leaders who want to bring a business from good to great, Steve’s bozo theory is super important to remember and an effective detector can be essential for success.

However in consulting industry, diplomacy and pleasing personalities are often the necessity to the extent that it could be both the short-term winning card and the long-term poison. Leaders in consulting need to be mindful about how they play the cards to win business and at the same time to stay true to oneself and to the principals. The establishment of a truthful competent image of the company and its people will be forever lasting no matter for providing products or services.

Management Consulting

Is “Agile Methodology” Truly Agile?

Companies which start thinking about adopting Agile or Scrum Methodology in their software development or IT support cycle because it seems to the current fashion in the industry may need some careful thinking.

Before answering the question of the title line, the first question need to be answered by these companies in fact is: Is your software development a creative endeavor or a commodity production? Or can your IT cycle be reduced into assembly line stages? If the answers to the above question are ambiguous, then think again whether Agile/Scrum method is suitable for you.

From TriStrategy’s observations of many software/IT companies using “Scrum Methodology” or groups in high-tech industry trying to mimic it in order to stay in fashion as the name itself seems to indicate, the success is far and apart and the results can be just the opposite sometimes.

If a creative endeavor is absolutely critical in making software product a success, then what’s the point of measuring human creativity by the yardstick of an hour? If a well-motivated group of individuals need to communicate timely and collaborate closely, what’s the point of showing up in daily stand-up meetings with the people who often sit in next cubes to you and answering others’ dry inquiries about what you have done in the day or why you are doing or not doing the assigned small tasks? If we can all expect that every piece of software feature or IT action can be measured by the hour based on some average mind, why do we need hire so many high-paid skilled talents in these fields instead of just creating some standard robots with measurable movements for each small step for the task? Why do we value experienced leaders or project managers to have the uncanny abilities of placing resources at their best strengths and motivate them to achieve the most?

If one day, the tools and technologies have advanced to such a degree that many of the current creative efforts can be done by the machines, then software and IT industry will enter into a whole new age that is comparable to the industrial revolution time of the assembly lines. Then this “agile methodology” may be better termed as “measurable assembly-line method”. Will that ever be true for all software development or IT environment?
One time, a fairly senior director at a big software company described to me that their online services group with scrum by the master’s book resembled a running a train which routinely stops or leaves at regular intervals. All people in the group are put into this routine, days in and days out, reported and pushed by the scrum hours. Then he wanted to seek advice on the group’s worries about the current stage of degrading morale, depressing atmosphere and the exodus of their talented resources in their “agilely” managed environment. He was describing exactly a typical environment that can be the result from this methodology if rigidly applied. In simpler terms, they turned a creative work environment into a grindstone or assembly line for everyone. I told him that the reasons are simple: human are not machines and businesses vary. Creative people cannot be fitted into square holes, no matter what the so-called “scrum masters” may say.

The logic and approach embedded in Scrum methodology can be questionable if we are not in the least in an age that all software and IT cycle can be done by robots. It simply humiliates human capabilities, demotes the true values of creativity, passion, individuality or ingenuity, and amplifies the distrust of workplace devotion and collaborative spirits.

It’s such a great relief that we heard from neither Steve Jobs nor Bill Gates on promoting the so-called “Agile Methodology”. Because they had in their own experience created completely opposite type of atmosphere that they knew would work, a lot more productive, creative and exciting for people to work together to achieve the best they can. They believed in creativity, productivity and human potentials in the true sense. Their time has not fully passed yet because we can never live without creativities for new products, new tools and new services.

We cannot foolhardily accept any superficial hype. There will be people who might fall into the categories whose jobs could one day be replaced by robots or tools, but it would happen only because they permit it in their minds and actions. Human potentials are unlimited. Unlocking them is the key for any success. Suppressing them with rigid process or controls will serve just the opposite. Similarly intelligent humans will never yield to the robots or the robot-minded, because they want to create them and use them, not to be controlled by them.

Business Lessons Learnt

Boeing’s Dreamliners yet to have dreams come true

Boeing’s 787 line has been suffering some serious setbacks and bad PR lately. Well, it’s one of the most publicized product lines for Boeing. It has a long delay and it attracts long attentions. The result of any mistake is thus amplified by the time duration of the product finally coming to the market after years of delays.

It’s not the only noticible story ever in the business world. Another big company, once neighbors to each other,  has similar “Lessons Learnt” to Boeing still fresh in mind: Microsoft’s Vista launch. After 5 long years of waiting and delays, the product was reviewed unfavorably by the customers. Microsoft quickly corrected the actions in the next better OS launch after Vista, but a quick fix for an airplane model may take some time. Still, how Boeing deals with the current challenge will be critical for the big company’s image.

There hasn’t been such a Murphy’s Law which states: A significantly delayed project will result in poorer quality and worse customer acceptance. Well, it is very much the truth though in many cases. 

So what are the true reasons behind these significant drawbacks or failures?  Too many creative ideas? Too many unpredicated innnovations? To much publicity resulted in unrealistic expectations? Too daring? Too hard to manage? Bad economy? Yet, wait please, aren’t all of these already included in the normal categories of project management tasks – especially risk anticipation and risk management? To the end, a well-planned and well-managed project should encompass all and still can lead to a successful product completed on the expectations of time, budget and quality. Sounds like the true talents of such capability are still rare in big companies. People are usually the most unpreditable cause of any major failure.

Business Strategies

6 Common Business Strategy Errors

We like very much the summary of the common errors on business strategies from the book Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works. By A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin, Harvard Business Review Press, 2013.

The Economist magazine today helps give a succint notes of these common strategy errors:
 

  • The Do-It-All strategy- No choice, no priorities.
  • The Don Quixote strategy-  Attacks the company’s strongest competitor first like a fool.
  • The Waterloo strategy- War on too many fronts at once.
  • The Something-For-Everyone- Tries to capture every sort of customer at once.
  • The Programme-Of-The-Month-The populist approach, pursuing whatever fashionable in an industry as a strategy.
  • The Dreams-That-Never-Come-True strategy- Never translates ambitious mission statements into clear choices about which markets to compete in and how to win in them.

Business leaders are tasked to make their strategies work and avoid these common errors. That may be easy to say than done. For new business, we’ve seen so many easily falling into the above categories. We all need keep in mind and keep practicing.  And then, most importantly: “no strategy lasts forever”.