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On Being Acquired – Lessons Learned

April 30, 2012 by 2 Comments

Once upon a time, I was one of the three full-time employees at Colusa Software, which Microsoft acquired in 1996.  We all came to Microsoft as part of the buyout, and went on to learn some interesting lessons about having your very small company acquired by a very large one.

Who We Were

Colusa was building some nifty virtual machine technology – you could target it from any conventional language, could run in a protected sandbox, and could get close to natively compiled performance on a variety of hardware platforms.   Our dream was that we would contribute towards a VM for Windows that would ultimately run much of the software in the world.  Other companies wanted to acquire us, but we came to Microsoft because we thought it offered the best chance for our technology to be ubiquitous – we said to each other that it would be a place to build software that “my mom will use.”  That was a very powerful motivation.

What Happened

After we were acquired, we ended up in the Visual Studio organization.  It seemed to make sense because we needed to work closely with the compiler team to target the VM, but actually it was a mistake.  All of the major decisions about runtimes were being made elsewhere, and we had limited contact with the key people.  Many of them were already committed to other solutions.

The result was that we kept getting redirected from afar.  “Your VM would be perfect if the wire size was smaller than Java.”  Ok, we went and built a cool compression strategy that yielded extremely compact code.  “Your VM is out of the question because it isn’t compatible with Java bytecodes.”  Oh.  “Your VM is Microsoft’s future.”  Great!  “Your VM would be cool, but isn’t practical without a substantial modification to Windows that would require too many resources.”  But …  And so on.

Amidst these conflicting messages, we tried to soldier ahead.  We rebuilt our original system to work with Windows, and demonstrated that it worked  by recompiling Microsoft Word and running it on the VM with performance indistinguishable from natively compiled code.  Eventually the team helped design the bytecode strategy of one of the VMs in the operating system.  Although it wasn’t what we had originally hoped to accomplish, the ideas did influence the design of a part of Windows.

So, what did I learn from all this?

Lesson #1: Have a champion

By far the most important lesson is that you desperately want to have a senior person who is the champion for your group.  We didn’t have one, and we suffered badly for it.  The need is particularly acute if you walk into a politically charged area.  There were deep divisions in the company that we didn’t understand – it was confusing for long-time employees and utterly baffling to us.  We thought we had something that the company would eagerly seize upon.  Over the course of six months, we were told that we had one of the most important projects in the company, that our technology would be scrapped, and that we should redesign it in ways that we felt would be a disaster.  Not fun.

I don’t think anyone could have prevented the situation from being difficult and confusing, because the company was facing very tough and important decisions.  But at least we would have felt that somebody was in the key meetings advocating for us and then telling us what was happening.  I think the team was hurt, for example, by a feeling among some key partner teams that we were overselling.  We thought we had carefully explained that, for a commercially viable solution, we would have to rely on other parts of the company to deliver key missing pieces.  But that message didn’t get through.  This kind of disconnect happens all the time and is natural; people who hear about a technology without the details make assumptions about what it does and doesn’t deliver.  Teams have to actively (and continually) educate their partners.  We just weren’t talking to them.  In fact, we didn’t even know their names.

To a company being acquired, I can’t stress enough that you want a politically savvy champion who has the ear of the key architects, people in management, etc. and will go to bat for you when it is appropriate.  You want that person to be identified with the acquisition and their credibility on the line as to whether it succeeds or fails.  They should drive you hard and want to exploit your ideas for the maximum benefit of the company – after all, that’s what you want, too!

Lesson #2: End up in the right part of the organization

Many large organizations have teams that are quite autonomous from each other.  If you land in the right place, which we didn’t, the people around you will understand how to integrate your technology into the product portfolio of the company and be in a position to make that happen.  The key thing, though, is that your hosting organization is the one that drives the decisions that most directly affect you.

Lesson #3: Nobody trusts you

Getting acquired feels like a seal of approval.  It says that you were doing something cool enough that the big company felt it was better to buy it than to build it themselves.  That doesn’t prepare you for the likelihood that nobody in your new company will trust you at all.  They won’t believe that your code is any good or that your team is up to the standards of the rest of the organization.

As far as I’ve seen, there are only two solutions:

  • Seed your team with some experienced and trusted employees from the big company.  This is a great idea anyway, because in addition to providing credibility, they can also be enormously helpful in getting things done in your new environment.
  • Ship and win in the marketplace.  That’s the ultimate coin of the realm in any software company.

Final Thoughts

There were ups and downs throughout the experience, but I learned an enormous amount from being acquired by and working within a large company.  I’m doing my third startup now, and hopefully applying lessons learned from all the experiences I’ve been fortunate enough to have along the way.

Filed Under: 1000x, 100x, 10x Tagged With: ,

Use the “Pet Rock Principle” for your next project review

April 24, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Ah, the project review.  Like death and taxes, if you work in a larger company, these are probably an inevitable fact of life – at some point, and maybe quite frequently, you have to get in front of somebody senior and give a review of the state of your project.  At Microsoft, the ritual of the “BillG Review” was woven into the culture when Bill ran the company.  Your review might be anything from a routine monthly status update to a high stakes undertaking with people who have the ability to cancel the project (and/or fire you).

Designing a great review is complex and involved; you want to tell a compelling story that resonates with your audience, to distill the work into its essence, and to convince that the team is executing well and should continue to get support.  These reviews can take on a life of their own and soak up tremendous amounts of time that could be (much) better employed in getting the darn work done, rather than talking about it.  This is one of the reasons that small organizations can be more efficient – they don’t need to prepare reviews of the work they are doing, because everyone is too busy getting it done.

Enter the Pet Rock

To avoid getting bogged down in an expensive manage-up exercise, when I’m preparing for a review I try to stay focused on what I call the “pet rock” principle.  If you didn’t grow up in America in the 1970’s, you might not have heard about the pet rock – it was a hilarious (and self-mocking) fad where people bought a rock, instead of a real pet, because they are much less trouble to take care of.  Pet rocks were very good at some tricks – as the instruction manual explained, they excel at “sit” and “stay”, but struggle with “shake hands”.  Since the pet rock is an iconically useless object, it seems like the perfect stand-in for some members of senior management, as seen from the trenches.

The principle that’s guided me through many reviews (on both sides of the table) is that most of the value from a really good review would be achieved if you replaced the audience with a pet rock.  In other words, the review should be mostly designed to benefit the team, not the reviewers.

As easy as it is to get cynical about reviews, they can be a valuable exercise.  They force you to:

  • Articulate the goals, strategy, and execution plan for the project.  As I have repeatedly advocated throughout this blog, there is magic to writing things down.  It forces you to think much more carefully and systematically than you usually do.  A review is a great opportunity to tell your story to your own team.  Usually the leaders of a team assume that everybody “gets it” .. and often that isn’t true.  It’s incredibly valuable for the team to walk through the vision, the strategy, and the plan.  From research in advertising, we know that people do not absorb a message until the third exposure (and some studies have yielded much larger numbers).
  • Distill the essence of the work.  Senior people generally get bored easily, so they won’t let you maunder on at endless length about what you are doing.  They want it summarized into a succinct and effective form.  Figuring out how to capture the work you are doing in a tight and lean format is a powerful exercise.  And it’s hard.  Often you won’t bother to do that work until you have a forcing function, and the review can be that forcing function.
  • Enumerate top issues/risks and what is being done about them. It’s easy for teams to get desensitized to their biggest problems.  “Well, yes, there is a blazing fire over there that threatens our success, but it’s been on fire for a while and we just don’t have time right now to worry about it.”  Reviews can force you to think those problems through and make sure you have a plan to resolve or mitigate them.

An excellent review can be a morale booster that reminds everyone of the exciting mission that they are on.  It can identify issues that are falling through the cracks, and can help you to hone your execution.  Mostly, that isn’t how it works, though – they provide modest benefits (at best) for the team, and they represent a bunch of overhead that saps precious reserves of energy and enthusiasm.

So if you are pulling a review together, see if this principle helps you stay focused.  Constantly ask yourself whether you are working on something you would truly continue to do if there were a pet rock presiding over the review.  When the answer is no, you are just managing up.  You may have to do some of that, but the more you do, the less you are advancing the organization’s true interests, and the more you are creating the overhead that everyone complains about.

Omit needless work .. and remember the rock!

Filed Under: 1000x, 100x, Rhythms of Business Tagged With: ,

Ready to Ace Your Exit Interview?

April 18, 2012 by Leave a Comment

When I’m having a management or a mentoring conversation, I like to pose the following challenge: “You just got offered an amazing new job .. it’s one you’ve always dreamed of.  But before you leave, you have an exit interview with your manager and your successor.  What do you want to tell them about your tenure, your team, and your projects?  What burning issues will your successor inherit and are they on track to being resolved?”

The answers depend, of course, on the nature of your current role.

  • If you are a manager, you probably want to talk about what a great, high morale team you have.  How the people are on a good trajectory, or how you are working with the ones who aren’t to get on a clear path for addressing the problems.  How you have a strong bench of future leaders you’ve been developing (hopefully your successor is one of them).  The mission is inspiring, the goals are clear and reflect the biggest opportunities available, the strategy is compelling, and the execution is effective.
  • The projects that you are responsible for are on a great path to success.  As you leave, things will continue seamlessly forward because the work is well organized and you have made sure that it an be passed over cleanly to somebody else.  No commitments will be missed, no balls dropped.
  • The issues that potentially block success have been analyzed and are being addressed and/or mitigated.

If you can say all that, congratulations on having aced your exit interview!  The person who is taking over for you is truly set up for success, but they have some big shoes to fill.

*****

Is that how it’s going to go?  If not (and I have yet to meet anyone who says it will!), what are the biggest reasons you won’t be taking a victory lap at your exit interview?

Usually, I find that there are a handful of big issues that people are worried about and that aren’t on a good track to resolution.  They might be:

Unpleasant.  People problems often fall into this bucket.  Sure, things aren’t great, and yes, something really ought to be done about it, but dealing with it is going to suck.  It’s often doubtful whether there will be a clear resolution at the end, especially if the other person doesn’t work for you and hence you have limited options for adjusting the situation.   So, it’s easier to just avoid the whole thing and keep bumbling along.

Important but not urgent.  Creating that new market would be an amazing win for the company.  Hiring a senior architect could transform the ability of the team to build great software.  But there is no particular urgency – no deadline will be missed, there is no forcing function.  And there are a hundred emails to answer, and that milestone is coming up, and my schedule is packed, and …

Hard.  I know that I should really be working on this big issue or opportunity, but I don’t exactly know how to do it.  I have to go get educated in some new area, or break through a tough analysis, or learn a new skill that I secretly fear I’ll be lousy at.  One way or another, it’s going to be a ton of work, and I’m not sure that I’ll really get anywhere, and my plate is full of things I do know how to do.

I’ve found that these big issues that people feel bad about are often the most important things they should be focused on.  So, I get them to write down the list of those issues, and then I ask the key next question: what specific actions are you going to take about each one, and when?  Because feeling bad doesn’t accomplish anything .. you need to take action.  I keep track, too, and the next time we talk, I bring it up again to see whether there has been progress.

Are you ready to ace your exit interview?  Why not?  What are you going to do about it?

Filed Under: 1000x, 100x, 10x, Managing People Tagged With:

What Should Managers Do All Day Long?

March 5, 2012 by 3 Comments

What managers spend their time on is often the source of (frequently cynical) commentary by the people who work for them.  I have found that it is also a source of anxiety for a lot of managers.  They often aren’t quite sure what they should be doing to add the most value.  It becomes even tougher, I’ve found, as you get more senior and have larger organizations to worry about.  You become very detached from the real work that is going on and what you do seems pretty distantly related to anything concrete.

Let’s take an example.  When I was the general manager of a pretty large team (400 people), I had a clear idea what the team needed to do – deliver a high quality next release of the product and grow the business 20% this year.  Great, but since I’m not writing any code or carrying a quota, how do I contribute to those goals?  What do I prioritize Monday afternoon at 3pm to help the team hit its goals?

To keep my sanity, I needed something that was my north star.  I created a document which I called “My Job”, and I reviewed it at least once a week.  It has the activities that I did, not the goals of the team.  For example, the first one is “Inspire” – I want to inspire the people on the team with a vision of where we are headed and why it is important and convince them that it is within reach.  Another is “Drive Rhythms” – for a team at scale, you have to have efficient rhythms to review the state of the business, check in with the engineering team each milestone, manage budgets, etc.

I scheduled an hour every Monday morning to plan the week, and one of the most important things I did was to take the “My Job” page and walk through these four steps:

1.  What’s F-ed up?

For each activity, I asked myself the question, “what’s f-ed up?”  And if I felt ambitious, “how can I move this forward proactively?”  This was an opportunity to dump all the hopes and anxieties buzzing around in my head down on paper.  The key thing was not to hold back – I wanted to get it all out.  And I wanted to make myself think about each activity in case it needed more attention than I was giving it.

2.  What can be done about it?

Next, I went back through the list to figure out what could be done about everything I had written down.  I needed to be in a very different state of mind – to go from a free-flowing brainstorm to focusing on concrete steps I could take.  I’ve found that it can be hard to switch back and forth quickly – once I’m being detailed and practical, the ideas don’t flow as freely.  So that’s why I do the whole second column first, then go back and do the third.  The things in the third column are very straight-forward and doable (“next actions” in Getting Things Done lingo).  These are specific actions I can do right away.

3.  Should I be the one doing it?

One easy trap to fall into (I am highly prone to this) when you are a manager is to over-function .. to jump in and do work that properly ought to be done by the people who work for you.  It’s like the over-protective parent who does everything for their kids, so they never learn how to do things for themselves.  It’s very annoying for the direct report who wants to solve their own problems.  So before I start firing off emails and diving into all those actions, I look them over to make sure that I’m the right person to do them.

4. Am I doing the really important “only I” things?

One of my favorite questions on this front comes from Peter Drucker, who was one of the people who basically invented management theory.  He wrote many useful books (try “The Essential Drucker” if you are interested – it’s a good survey of his ideas across a variety of topics).   And he challenges managers to ask themselves a very important question: “What can I, and only I, do, that, if done well, would have the most impact on the organization?”  This is a great question to ask yourself.  I suspect that every action item you identified is a useful thing to do, and will be of some value for the team.  So the question shouldn’t be “what adds value?”  Most or all of them will, hopefully, if you have a clue.  The question is, “what adds the most value that nobody else can do?”  Make sure you do those, before you fritter away all your time doing random things that aren’t going to have as much impact or that somebody else can do equally well.

Once I’ve gone through this exercise, I really feel like I have a handle on what I am worried about, what I should be worried about, what I could do about it, and what I will do.  This exercise translates high-level goals like “grow the business” into “set up a meeting with Mary to adjust quotas” and turns “ship a high quality release” into “review the latest benchmark numbers on the performance issues with the new version of the database.”   And it (helped) keep me out of the way of the team when they didn’t need me.

Do you have a north star that tells you what your job is?  What tools help you figure it out?

Filed Under: 1000x, 100x, 10x, Managing People Tagged With: , ,

The Sacredness of Ownership

February 24, 2012 by 1 Comment

sa·cred (sā′krid) – secured as by a religious feeling or sense of justice against any defamation, violation, or intrusion; inviolate

The word “sacred” is not one to be used lightly, but I chose it on purpose to talk about a principle I believe is at the heart of any healthy team culture: ownership.  I’ve spent most of my career building large scale software projects, and these are intensely complex systems.  No one person can understand all that complexity and track all the infinite detail of a large-scale project.  And it only takes one person writing a few lines of sloppy code to introduce a security hole that can cause tremendous damage to your customers and to your company.  The success of the whole venture rests on the decisions that the people at the front lines of the team are making every day.  So they’d better feel like they own their work, and they’d better be right!

What It Means to “Own” Something

Does “owning” something mean you get to do whatever you want with it?  No.  In defining ownership, many people focus on making decisions, which is important.  But to me, the most important thing about being an owner is that you are accountable for the success of what you own.  Therefore, the first and most important thing that an owner should do is to define success.  This sounds easy, but it isn’t, and many people do this wrong.  If you are a developer and own a feature, success doesn’t mean that you wrote good code and checked it in.  Success means that the whole feature team understands the feature and why it is needed, you coded it, you nailed the basics like performance and security, it works well, it shipped, and many happy customers are using it to solve real needs that they have.  A good owner defines success in terms of impact, not activity.  They include key stakeholders.  They feel accountable for the whole success, not a narrow part of it.

It is very tempting to define success in terms of what you control.  This is a classic mistake that people make, especially when they are early in their career.  They only feel accountable for the part they fully control.  “But I’m the developer .. isn’t it enough that I write great code that works?”  NO.  The customer does not care if you wrote good code.  The customer cares if you solved their problem.  Shareholders don’t care if you wrote good code.  They care if customers love the product and buy a lot of it.  You need to feel accountable for the whole success, even though you almost certainly don’t control it.  If you did everything right that you control, and the feature fails to be successfully used by many happy customers, then you failed.  The reason this is so important is that people generally try very hard to succeed.  If you define success broadly, you won’t settle for the excuse that “my part works – it was the other bonehead who blew it”.  You’ll go the extra mile, you’ll escalate if somebody else is screwing up and taking the whole ship down.  It doesn’t matter how beautifully you polished the handrail on the Titanic.  You still drowned.

Decision Making and Overlapping Ownership

One thing that’s confusing about ownership is that multiple people can seemingly own the same thing.  For example, the people designing a product and the engineering team that builds it all need to own what they work on.  Doesn’t that violate the whole idea of ownership?  No, if you internalize the accountability model.  All of the groups contributing must feel accountable for the whole success of their work.

Great, but then how do decisions get made?  The answer is that it depends what you are deciding.  For example, the ultimate decision maker about the way to code a feature better be the developer.  But there are other stakeholders – developers might have to do a code review with their lead or a fellow developer.  They might need to follow development guidelines set up by the development manager, so other people can understand the code and it fits in with the rest of the system.  The designer needs the feature to actually meet the user’s needs.  The developer still owns the code and is accountable for its success, but they must honor the (legitimate!) roles of other people in achieving that success.

Stakeholders

Let’s say you are the owner and hence the decision maker.  One of your responsibilities as owner is to understand who else has a stake in the decisions you are making and what their role is.  Sometimes this is obvious, or you can just use intuition and it all works out.  That’s often the case in small teams.  But as you own more important and complicated things and are part of larger organizations, you will run into the limits of the ad hoc approach.  That’s when it becomes useful to think explicitly about the other stakeholders and their roles.

Once upon a time, the Windows team realized that decision-making was a mess – people weren’t sure whom they had to consult, who was the butt on the line for key decisions, etc.  And so things fell through the cracks or there was gridlock, and accountability was lacking.  As a result, they created a role/stakeholder model that has been used with a lot of success at Microsoft (called OARP).  There are industry equivalents (a popular one is called RACI) – which one you pick isn’t that important.  The key thing is to be explicit about the roles in a particular decision and make sure everyone understands what their role is.  Writing this down will often reveal misunderstandings (“what do you mean I don’t get to review the decision before it is finalized??!!!”) and problems (“we have to review this with twenty people before we lock the decision down?  That’s not going to work.”).  In general, the owner’s life and the team’s efficiency will improve radically as you reduce the number of reviewers, approvers, and other obstacles to progress.

Dealing With Misbehaving Stakeholders

Just because you have done a great job defining the ownership model and gotten everyone to understand it and agree to it in theory doesn’t mean that’s actually how things are going to work out.  People will frequently violate their role, often through the best of intentions.  Maybe your lead says you are the owner but they don’t respect your ownership and are always micromanaging you or giving direction to your team without including you in the conversation.  Maybe people elsewhere in the organization who are supposed to review decisions start turning into participants or are making decisions on your behalf.  And so forth – the opportunities for misbehavior are legion.  Sometimes they happen because people are too eager to help, often because people are being thoughtless, and sometimes from malice.

Your responsibility as the owner is to treat these as problems and get them fixed.  That super-helpful senior manager who comes down and straightens things out for you without you asking for help?  Problem.  Either you blew it, or that very helpful manager did, or you both did.  The participant who thinks you are blowing it as an owner and second guesses your decisions without confronting you about it?  Problem.

If someone in your management chain comes in and starts proclaiming this and that, there are two common reactions: 1) denial/rejection/anger and 2) “yes, sir, thank you”.  Both are wrong.  The right response from the owner is “good input, thanks”.  Then YOU go take action.  Don’t ignore what the manager thinks.  Sometimes they are giving you new data, sometimes advice (hopefully good).  Sometimes you are screwing up and they feel a need to jump in.  But if you are going to be a good owner, then you have to get the dynamics right.  You own the decision until ownership is taken away.  That should always be an explicit act – you might ask the manager to take over, they might inform you that they are taking over; that can be the right thing, but it is a very important change in the state of the project.  If ownership is leaving you and going somewhere else, you are no longer accountable for success.  That’s a big deal, and everyone needs to be clear about it.  You don’t have the right to demand to stay on as owner if your manager becomes convinced that you are not up to it.  You do have the right to demand clarity.

Final Thoughts

In my opinion, ownership is a crucial tenet of a healthy team culture.  How to take action on it?

  1. Figure out what you own.  Make sure everyone (including your manager) agrees.
  2. Define success.  Don’t be narrow.
  3. Figure out who the stakeholders are and respect their role.
  4. Go own the hell out of it.  Everyone is depending on you to get it right.
Filed Under: 1000x, 100x, 10x, 1x, Managing People Tagged With: , ,

What’s the Dimwit Duration On Your Team?

February 20, 2012 by Leave a Comment

One of the sad realities of life in a team is that decisions often become stupider as they filter their way from the decision maker to the place where they get implemented.  Over and over, I’ve seen something that started out as a rational and well-intentioned idea become twisted into something pointless or annoying or awful as it percolates its way through an organization.  If you are the one at the end of that process, it can be really hard to believe that it ever started out as even vaguely rational.  Why does this happen?

Decision “Telephone”

Well, one problem is that the person implementing the decision often doesn’t really understand the original idea.  You’ve probably played “telephone” as a kid – take a phrase and pass it by word of mouth down a line of people.  At the end, the result is revealed to much hilarity since it never even resembles how it started out.  Well, that’s what happens to decisions – their basic shape might make it down, if you are lucky, but the context and the rationale for it are often mangled beyond recognition.  This is just a fact of life about people – they are a very lossy channel for communication – and it isn’t fixable.

Decision Combinatorics 

The other problem is that a single decision will often end up getting applied in a lot of places to a lot of people, and the person who made it doesn’t always have a clue about them all.  And, multiple decisions, each of which may make a lot of sense in isolation, combine into a mess.  For example, “we won’t push out an update to our web site until we run our test passes on it.”  And, “our test passes will try out all the different browsers that people are commonly using.”  Result: the site is down for hours because you can’t push an update that is a tiny little tweak to a configuration setting.

Can Rationality Prevail?

You can try to counteract these problems by having rational people at the tip of the spear who apply the decision with flexibility and humor.  That way, something that becomes completely impractical is not rammed down the throats of the team.  It is very hard to create a culture at scale that works this way; it is just a lot easier to be rigid than to be thoughtful, and people are inclined to be lazy.  Also, someone is much less likely to get into trouble for applying a policy than for setting it aside, and many people are very risk averse.

By all means, try to do this .. but don’t be surprised if it fails a lot.

Enter the Dimwit Duration

The only real cure I’ve ever seen for the bad decisions that slip through is to minimize what I call the “dimwit duration”.  This is the period of time that the stupid implementation of a decision stands, before somebody with the power to undo it finds out and can fix it.  Now a lot of factors play into this:

  • How often the decision maker meets and talks to the people who implement their ideas
  • How much power and authority is pushed down the organization
  • How detail-oriented and open-minded the decision makers are about what’s really going on
  • How egregious the decision is and how many people are affected
  • Where the team falls on the culture spectrum between “ruthless candor” and “sir, yes sir”.

The size of the team also has a lot to do with it – it’s one of the many reasons that I like smaller teams, where the doers and the leaders bump into each other often and know each other well enough to be honest.  In many large organizations, they never really do meet, and bad decisions can persist forever.  People can fall into a sense of despair that sanity will prevail, and you get the kind of bureaucratic inertia that Kafka satirized so effectively, with everybody just marching along.

What’s the Dimwit Duration on your team, and what are you doing to shorten it?

Filed Under: 1000x, 100x Tagged With:

1000x – The Challenges of Scale

February 20, 2012 by Leave a Comment

When teams get this large, some good things happen, but a lot of bad ones do, too.  Along with an incredible amount of potential horsepower to harness, you just entered Dilbert country.  If you are helping to run the team, you just became the pointy-haired boss.  Yup, that’s you in the mirror – smile!

The biggest problem with teams this large is that there is spotty at best contact between the people who are doing the work on the ground and the people who are making the key decisions that affect the whole team.  Human connections just don’t scale to this size – if you did a one hour 1:1 with everyone on the team for 40 hours every week, you could only talk to everyone once a year .. and you wouldn’t get much else done.  In another post, I talked about the “dimwit duration” – how long it takes for a decision that has become stupid to make its way from the point of stupidity (the person affected) to the decision maker who can fix it.  That duration, for a lot of decisions, just went to infinity.

Some other things that tend to happen:

  • The people “in charge” have lost their connection with what’s really going on .. but don’t realize it.  To quote Will Rogers, “Ignorance is not the problem in the world. It’s the things people ‘know’ that aren’t so.”
  • There is a lot of structure that can become rigid and calcifying.  Business reviews, corporate policies, complex approval processes, etc.
  • There are many stakeholders for every decision.  A pipe is leaking; in a small team, somebody slaps some duct tape on it.  On a big team, there is the person who represents the maintenance department.  There is the person who manages liability – maybe there is a health issue caused by the pipe?  There are representatives from the teams affected by the leaky pipe.  Somebody is responsible for the budget – how much will it cost to fix the pipe?  There is the decision maker who can actually approve a new course of action – they have to be pretty senior because they have to be seen as an authority figure by all the different stakeholders.  And they are really busy, so you can’t get on their calendar for a meeting until next month.  Decision making slows to a crawl, even for relatively trivial things .. and making a truly major shift in the direction of the team is like turning an oil tanker.
  • People become abstractions.  Part of the nature of the beast if you run teams at this scale, is that you have to do things that affect the whole team.  You manage the budget, you manage staffing levels, you build review models, etc.  And the actual human beings in all their messy individuality tend to turn into numbers in a spreadsheet.  It’s hard to remember how much impact a decision has on real actual people.  I minored in military history when I was in college, and the same thing happens when you study strategy – the people who are suffering and fighting and dying become chess pieces on a board.  But much of what makes a team successful is not the grand strategy and the spreadsheet wizardry, it’s the organic minutiae of execution.

In this section, we’ll talk about what you can do to keep your hair from getting too pointy – if you wear a cool hat and a funky T-shirt, maybe not too many people will notice.

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