What really matters?

As some people reading this blog know, I've been having a few political difficulties at work, of the sort that you'd be upset about if they happened to your friends. I've been openly attacked a couple of times, and a lot more than that in the background, and sometimes it's been hard to keep it all in perspective. But equally sometimes it just takes a phrase to snap everything back into place. Some friends with the same problem had been down at my new desk talking about it all, and as they were leaving the wise old owl next to me leant over and said that when he thought about sacking someone, he always asked himself two questions: is this person doing their job, and are they disturbing the rest of the team (with a third question: could I easily replace them with someone who could do their job better if the answer to either of those were 'no')?

I thought about this for a bit, and felt a little more at peace with the situation, because in the end, it doesn't matter how much poo your company has put you through - if you can answer each of these questions well, then you're doing okay.

The Survival of the Crocodile

Whilst I was talking through a possible taxonomy of Jurassic business entities, S commented that it made most sense to be a crocodile. Which is something like a dinosaur, but smaller, more agile (mostly), better adapted and still around. It's a thought. I'm not sure how well this analogy will survive, but it could be worth investigating.

Requirements

Requirements can be a little problematic. User, system and technical requirements are difficult enough to define well in a customer-driven field where there is a defined customer who is expert and knows exactly what they want, but in a field with a non-expert customer or no customer, they can be close to impossible.

In innovations, there is typically no defining customer, so you have to create requirements against a series of expert guesses about who the end user is, what that end user is likely to want and to use the system for, who the buyer is (and their own estimate of the end user, which is itself likely to differ from the eventual end use) and against market moves that you can only roughly predict from what you can see of your potential competitors, suppliers and market-makers (where they exist too).

And if you're innovating in a fast-moving field (e.g. consumer electronics or finance), the merit of carefully creating and working against requirements can itself be debatable because the field could itself move on whilst the requirements are being created. At which point we get into spiral development, rapid application development and other agile requirement-development models. Most of which, from the outside at least, look rather chaotic (in the bounded rational sort of sense of chaos). Just ask yourself: how many projects has Google delivered on time recently? And how much does that matter?

On the Importance of Being Honest

How important is honesty in business? For many of us, the image of businessmen - I mean businesspeople - is that of players in a large-scale game of poker, where deception is common and nobody ever wants to show their hands. Maybe that exists in the middle layers of some places, from and between people using image and perception to gain their next promotion, but on the whole people at the strategic layers of business appear to be essentially honest about what they do, what they want and what they believe their company to be. This is amply backed up by studies of leaders and enterpreneurs, which show that honesty is one of the most externally valued traits by venture capitalists, and the trait most likely to be rewarded with money. So honesty at the strategic level of a company is to be broadly applauded.

The flip side of strategic honesty is when it highlights a disconnect between the layers of a large company; where an honest assessment at the top of the company does not match an honest assessment from the bottom of it. A great deal of political courage may be needed to admit that this is the case, and a great deal of effort may be needed to bring the two assessments into alignment, but the cost if this is not done is almost always much higher (in trust, stress, and even in lost contracts) than if it is. I'm not suggesting that every strategic player puts all their cards face-up on the table at all times, but they really shouldn't kid themselves into thinking they're always holding 5 aces.

On Competence

Sh! Whisper it quietly, but some dinosaurs (*) encourage incompetence, i.e. people who don't understand the job. It works something like this. The company hires someone based on their own assessment of their competence (i.e. a 'good' CV and interview), or promotes then through the company to above the position where their natural skills are adequate (see the Peter Principal, Parkinson's Law etc). And then the real problems start. Not being able to do a defined job is bad, but not being able to judge if your own staff are doing a good job can be disastrous. And if you've built a position of influence because you present well (see CV and interview comment above), you can put yourself in a position to destroy large parts of the right sort of company.

* Dinosaur = large monolithic company. More on this soon.

Living organisations

I've been reading "transferring tacit knowledge in extended enterprises" by Nousala et al. Yes, yes, I know, but it's useful for work. So today's thought is "how far can we take the organisation as organism analogy?". The paper picks up on a previously popular theme, that organisations (companies, cities, any complex set of interacting people) can usefully be modelled as if they are living organisms. Which includes concepts like autopoiesis - how do we know when something is alive, and rather more Popperian theory than I've seen since I was last at university.

Now I have a soft spot for the independence of mitochondria - the idea that something as complex as a human can contain cells that are not only doing their own thing, but just happen to be hanging around in the neighbourhood. But I digress. What is perhaps more important is the question "is a company a cat or a big shaggy dog?". Does it exist on its own terms and selfishly decide its own fate, or hang around with its tongue sticking out waiting for someone to throw a stick for it? If a company like that is a dog, then how come dogs manage to survive? And can I use the caveman analogy now, that the dog-human symbiosis evolved because dogs were a really good early-warning system and hence worth being fed by the humans.

I really really want to explore these ideas, I have a dozen others hanging around them, some serious, some not-so-serious, but I can't. I've had my one thought for today. And this is hard, so terribly terribly hard. But I'll sit on my hands now and keep trying to reach for that elusive simplicity, that golden possibility of clearer communication. Aargh.

One a day

Hokay, I've committed to one a day. One post every day; one paragraph on just one idea. It's going to be difficult: the fear of not capturing every idea immediately is always with me, but I'm going to try. Today, I have no ideas. Tomorrow, I'll think of something.