Clarke Ching's Rocks and Snowballs

All MBA graduates should have skulls and crossbones stamped on their foreheads

Today's Financial Times has an article by Michael Skapinker discussing Henry Mintzberg's latest book Managers Not MBAs : A Hard Look at the Soft Practice of Managing and Management Development:

"All MBA graduates should have skulls and crossbones stamped on their foreheads, along with warnings that they are not fit to manage. They are the products of schools that specialise in teaching the wrong things to the wrong people. Few MBA students have ever run anything and you cannot teach them to do so in a classroom.

So says Henry Mintzberg, the veteran management writer and long-time scourge of the Masters of Business Administration degree. His views usually attract a hysterical response from MBAs - and who can blame them? They have spent more than $120,000 on their MBAs and here is Prof Mintzberg declaring them worthless".

Having met a few MBA's (myself not included, naturally) I'm inclined to agree :)

 

Now what?

Finally.

I've finished my MBA dissertation. It's printed and posted. I'm quite proud of it. I'll post a slightly modified pdf version once the dust has settled.

Next step is to sell the recommendations to my employers.  More to follow.

Downsizing is bad for your health - part ii

A couple of days ago I linked to a large medical study that showed the alarming medical side-effects for staff who survive downsizing , then today I received an email from the clever folk at www.crucialconversations.com discussing how to handle the stressful situation of surviving a downsizing.

The email isn't on the web so I've copied the text below. I'm not sure how proper this is but my intentions are pure. To be more explicit: please BUY THE crucial conversations BOOK - it's very very good.

Dear Crucial Conversations, Work at the office has been piling up! Like a lot of companies in this economy, we are asked to take on more responsibility as a result of other people being laid off. I am now working over 60 hours a week, and I don't have time for my family. How can I communicate my situation to reduce my workload and not risk losing my job too? I fear that I will be perceived as "not a team player" or a "weak performer." How do I avoid the sucker's choice? Signed, Silently Suffering

Answer by Al Switzler, coauthor of "Crucial Conversations"

Dear Suffering,
I often ask groups "What are some significant issues that you are dealing with poorly or avoiding altogether?" The number one response to this question is a resounding "I have too much on my plate, and I don't know how to bring it up without sounding like I am whining or I'm not a team player."
This problem has two parts--too much work and no way to bring the subject up. However, years of experience have taught me that if you don't talk it out, you act it out. Your stress levels rise along with your blood pressure, you develop a bad view of those around you (including the so-called villains at the top), your sense of corporate loyalty decreases, you lose focus at home on personal matters, you have less time for exercise and personal development, and you become increasingly reliant on comfort foods, complaining, and other stress-relieving activities to make sense of your life.

Help yourself get through the clever stories that you may be using to justify your own silence or violence by asking the following questions:
- "Am I pretending not to notice my role in this situation?" The role that most people don't admit to is being passive or silent. Not speaking up is part of the problem. It is a huge problem. So whatever stories you're telling yourself about why you can't speak up need to be examined closely.
- "Why would reasonable, rational, decent human beings do this?" Clever, pervasive stories about all management not listening or only being in it for the dollar may have some truth as applied to some individuals. These stories are almost never accurate when applied to management in general. In fact, most managers want to hear what will help the organization in terms of quality, cost, customer satisfaction, and employee satisfaction.
- "What should I do right now to move toward what I really want?" What you want is a good thing--work/life balance. You care a lot about productivity, quality, being a team player, and so on. And you care about you personal well-being as well as your family. Prepare now, and then speak up.
Finally, prepare what you'll do and say to "Make It Safe." Get an appointment in a setting that is private. Create and practice a permission statement with contrasting, such as "I'd like to talk about an issue that deals with productivity and satisfaction. What I don't want is this conversation to be seen only as my issue. I'd like to talk about ways that we can discuss resources, job stress, and work/life balance, by looking at it from a company perspective and the employee perspective. Would that be okay?"
Create and practice STATE-ing your path. Lead with the facts--with observations. "During the last three months, since the restructuring, I'm working 60 hours a week, and I'm feeling my work/life balance is stressed. I also feel like it's hard to talk about without seeming like I'm not a team player. I'm wondering how you see this issue."
Find a friend or colleague and really practice. The scripts I've suggested may be way off target for your challenges. After you've prepared, find a friend and practice. He or she can make suggestions for improvements. He or she can react in various ways and you can practice your responses. With a little practice, you'll be more able and confident to step up to this crucial conversation.
And remember, when you do step up, if it gets too tense or emotional, keep the conditions safe by saying something such as "I didn't want this to get emotional. I took a risk to bring up a tough topic. I was trying to find ways to deal with a problem that is bigger than me and it's not going well. I'd like to stop here and think some more about it. Would that be okay?" You can always repeat your purpose and ask for a delay. "Delaying" isn't "avoiding" if you think about, prepare some more, and make another attempt. Avoiding and withdrawing occur when you give up and let silence win.
So go get 'em. And best wishes.
Al

Downsizing is bad for your health - if you keep your job that is.

Here's an alarming article about the medical effects of downsizinga (pdf) from the british medical journal.

The Finnish study, of over 22,000 people who kept their jobs following downsizing, shows that the survivors - i.e. the lucky ones who kept their job - had double the chance of dying from a heart attack, compared to average...

"Results Major downsizing was associated with an increase in sickness absence (P for trend < 0.001) in permanent employees but not in temporary employees. The extent of downsizing was also associated with cardiovascular deaths (P for trend < 0.01) but not with deaths from other causes. Cardiovascular mortality was 2.0 (95% confidence interval 1.0 to 3.9) times higher after major downsizing than after no downsizing. Splitting the follow up period into two halves showed a 5.1 (1.4 to 19.3) times increase in cardiovascular mortality for major downsizing during the first four years after downsizing. The corresponding hazard ratio was 1.4 (0.6 to 3.1) during the second half of follow up.

Conclusion Organisational downsizing may increase sickness absence and the risk of death from cardiovascular disease in employees who keep their jobs".

 

summary of lean thinking

Here's an excellent - high level - summary of lean thinking:

(via Hal's blog)

MBA - was it worth it?

This blog entry is done purely as a means of avoiding the painful finishing touches of my MBA dissertation.  It's this or wash the dishes.

Was the MBA worth it?  I don't know.

On the cost side it cost me, over a 4 year period, the equivalent of about 6 months net income and I used roughly 1 in every 5 weekends to complete assignments.  The reading time wasn't nearly as much as everyone thinks and I usually managed to do it during my cummute.  Besides, I would've been reading stuff like that anyway.

The benefits.  When I started the MBA I was already a Theory of Constraints / Lean zealot and I figured that to truly understand TOC/Lean I needed to understand the old paradigm(s).  That was my original, noble, justification.  Now I’m nearly finished I reckon that 90% of the knowledge was from the old paradigm(s) and on it’s own not particularily new to me or useful, but about 10% was useful, new, knowledge.  The MBA covereded a very broad range of knowledge at – generally – a fairly high level.  We’ve covered the basics - HR, finance, structure, culture, strategy etc - and (since I specialised in technology management) subjects such as operations, product development, lean thinking, quality, knowledge management, complexity, creativity, etc but really only at a level that allows the “ignorant and confident” to talk convincingly without really understanding. 

They never mentioned Theory of Constraints once.

I’ve done it part time, by distance-learning so I have spent a lot of time reading – and memorising – by myself.  The occasional “group work” usually turned into p*ss*ng competitions between the MBAers already working as management consultants: more entertaining to watch than participate in. 

The most useful part has been doing my dissertation.  The process has been painful, long-winded and unnecessarily acadmic at times - even though it is supposed to provide useful "informed consultantcy" to my employer.  In fact it could have been fairly pointless and dire but I used TOC to work on a topic of great importance to me.  You've seen some of the trees and thinking in this web and - once I've printed and posted the dissertation - I'm going to polish the work I've done so far and take it through to completion. 

My writing is better than it used to be, although far from perfect.  My ability to talk in buzzwords is better, although my colleagues are very helpful in limiting this new skill (competency?) .  My spelling hasn’t improved at all.

Ultimately the most important question should be: would the MBA make me a better manager/leader?  By itself, I doubt it.  But adding the credability of an MBA to my TOC, Lean and now Agile knowledge and I think it will.  (BTW: I know a lot of MBAed managers who are complete pillocks).

Finally, I honestly believe I learned more about managing people and software projects during my two day Scrum Master training than in the first two MBA years.  Beat that.

 

bloglines - an elegant, free, web-based RSS reader

I've just, temporarily, switched from sharpreader to bloglines for my RSS feed.  Its web-based, suprisingly fast, and altogether quite impressive.  I'll see how it goes and report back.

The Social Life of Paper - by Malcolm Gladwell

Here's another great article, from The New Yorker magazine, by Malcolm Gladwell.  (pdf version)

Why Great?  Because I've a messy desk and Gladwell says that this is not only natural for some people, but necessary.  (I've also got very messy handwriting and my Mum maintains this is because my brain works far too fast for my hand to keep up.  Wise woman my Mum).

It starts:

"On a busy day, a typical air-traffic controller might be in charge of as many as twenty-five airplanes at a time--some ascending, some descending, each at a different altitude and travelling at a different speed. He peers at a large, monochromatic radar console, tracking the movement of tiny tagged blips moving slowly across the screen. He talks to the sector where a plane is headed, and talks to the pilots passing through his sector, and talks to the other controllers about any new traffic on the horizon. And, as a controller juggles all those planes overhead, he scribbles notes on little pieces of paper, moving them around on his desk as he does. Air-traffic control depends on computers and radar. It also depends, heavily, on paper and ink".

paradox: people value complex design, rather than simple designs

I'm currently writing up my MBA dissertation and I'm searching for a NAME that describes the paradox that:

• achieving a simple, elegant design is very hard work but
• since the design is so simple and elegant it looks like it should be easy.
• so you get less credit than if you design something that looks complicated.

Don Norman, author of The Design of Everyday Things, discusses this concept in Chapter 17 of Turn Signals are the Facial Expressions of Automobiles and even has a section titled "If It's Easy to Understand, Then It Can't Be Very Profound", but he hasn't named the concept, which is what I'm looking for.

Some of the consequences of this paradox:

• If you design something that's simple and elegant then your boss will ask you why it took so long or someone will say it's just plain common sense and they knew it all along (see the comment to this earlier post, for example).
• If you work long hours, or appear stressed, then people will think you're a better worker. (e.g. my boss recently told me that (a) he was thrilled with the quality and output of my work package and that it was largely down to my work, but (b) he was extremely disappointed that I'd only worked 6 hours overtime in the last year, unlike the troopers on the other (struggling) work packages who were coming in at the weekends).
• If you write a long document that's complicated and full of hard words then people will often rate the work as better than an simpler, easier version.

I posted this question on the information design guru Edward Tufte's FANTASTIC website and got a few interesting answers, but none were quite right - although "hindsight bias" is getting close.

My friends on the APICS Constraint Management SIG email list had a few more examples: 

• Jeff "SKI" Kinsey gave a classic example: 'i think mark twain and malcolm forbes said, "that if i had more time, i would have written a shorter letter." meaning that it takes time to refine and make it more concise and readable.' (NOTE: ski, doesn't use capitals)
• Tony Rizzo gave another  'It seems that you're looking for the antithesis of the Rube Goldberg.  I had a friend in Bell Labs, who faced a similar situation at every salary review process. My friend was an expert in surface-mount solder reliability, and he did his job. But at every salary review process somebody would always point out that the organization didn't really need my friend, because they never had any solder problems with their products.' [BTW: Rube Goldberg drew a series of cartoons that showed extremely clever and complicated "inventions" for doing simple, everyday tasks].
• and Grant Lindsay pointed out that "Nobody misses the water until the well runs dry..."

 

Can anyone help?

Cost of Change part II

A few weeks ago I discussed Boehm's Cost of Change Curve and how, in Balancing Agility and Discipline Boehm and Turner pointed out that 20% of changes made up 80% of the costs.

This suggests:

• 20% of changes have a very steep curve, and,
• 80% had a very shallow curve.

When I posted my thoughts to scrumdevelopment@yahoogroups.com, Mary Poppendieck replied :

"An experienced team can figure out which decisions need to be made early and which can wait until later.  Unfortunately, our development processes try to force all design decisions to be made as early as possible.  This is a bad approach, one that drives up the cost of change. 

Toyota has a product development process which is four times more productive than those employed by most companies. This process delays final design decisions to as late as possible in the process.  The result is that changes are generally not necessary – they don’t have to change decisions that haven’t yet been made".

So, this is the value of the Poppendiecks principle "Decide as late as possible" - if you don't make your decision until late, then when you do make your decision, your not changing anything.  The change is effectively free.  You can only "keep your options open" like this in an iterative environment ... the full blown waterfall makes you decide as early and quickly as possible.

In the mean time I've been writing up my dissertation and I chanced upon Boehm and Papaccio's 1988 article "Understanding and Controlling Software Costs" (from  IEEE Transactions on software engineering, volume 14, number 10, pp.1462-1477) where they say:

 “the major implication of this distribution is that software verification and validation activities should focus on identifying and eliminating the specific high-risk problems to be encountered by a software project, rather than spreading their available early problem elimination effort uniformly across trivial and severe problems.”

 Mr Boehm is a very clever chap.  We all owe him a beer. I hope I get to buy him when he's in Edinburgh for the 26th International Conference on Software Engineering, no that I'm attending).