Generalist Managers
I just read the latest article by Joel Spolsky over on Joel on Software (a site you really should bookmark). Joel reminisces about the time he had his First BillG Interview where he had to present the spec for what was going to be Visual Basic for Applications to Bill Gates. It’s a good read and Joel’s writing style is very entertaining. While Joel and I have differing opinions on some things, I certainly respect his experience and knowledge, and I suspect that the things we disagree about are simply related to the fact that he takes some concepts too literally (especially with regards to such Agile concepts and no BDUF, but’s that’s for another post).
Towards the end of the post, Joel makes this observation:
Bill Gates was amazingly technical. He understood Variants, and COM objects, and IDispatch and why Automation is different than vtables and why this might lead to dual interfaces. He worried about date functions. He didn’t meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn’t bullshit him for a minute because he was a programmer. A real, actual, programmer.
Watching non-programmers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn’t know how to surf trying to surf.
“It’s ok! I have great advisors standing on the shore telling me what to do!” they say, and then fall off the board, again and again. The standard cry of the MBA who believes that management is a generic function. Is Ballmer going to be another John Sculley, who nearly drove Apple into extinction because the board of directors thought that selling Pepsi was good preparation for running a computer company? The cult of the MBA likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don’t understand.
Hear! Hear!
You know, it’s not that I don’t respect management as a discrete set of skills, a seperate discipline if you will. Managing anything successfully requires a particular mindset and approach that is quite specific to the task of management, and the actions that a manager does (and the skill required to carry them out effectively) are specific and distinct from those needed in other endeavours (like, oh, I don’t know… developing software, for example).
That does not mean, however, that those skills are all that a manager needs in order to be effective.
I guess it is theoretically a possibility that somewhere there is an activity that can be managed by someone who has no understanding about that activity. (I am not saying that there is such an activity, just that there might be.)
But developing software is not it.
It is simply not possible to manage a software development project without a reasonable understanding of software development. I am not going to try to justify that statement here, because quite frankly either you know that this is true, or you can’t possibly be convinced that it is. What I will say, after 28 years in this game, is that whenever I have had to work with a “manager” that does not understand software development, the end result has invariably been sub-optimal. And by “sub-optimal” I mean a disaster, except where this was avoided by those who did understand and who went far beyond what could be expected of them and worked around that manager to get things done.
While it is not necessary (indeed, it may not even be desirable) for a manager in a software business to be the most technically competent developer, it is an absolute requirement that he or she be able to understand if something is easy or hard, if it is high risk or low risk, if it is reasonable or unreasonable, if it is obviously wrong, obviously right, or just plain not known. He or she needs to understand whether an estimate is reasonable, or whether it is too optimistic or too conservative.
If the manager can’t do these things, then how can he or she manage? Can you imagine this scenario? If I were asked to manage a banana farm (an activity I know absolutely nothing about) then here is a conversation with the farm workers:
Me: The buyers want bananas that are more uniform in size. How can we do this?
Workers: You can’t. Bananas have a certain variation in size. Indeed, the particular species we grow is internationally recognised as the most uniform in size.
OK. Now what? Is this true? What do I do next?
Worse still, the previous day, in the meeting with the buyer, the conversation had gone like this:
Buyer: Our consumers are complaining about the variation in the size of the bananas. We need them to be far more uniform.
Me: Oh, I’m sure that is not going to be a problem. After all, we employ world best practice farming techniques. I am sure we can do something about that. So if we add a clause to that effect into the contract, you will sign an order today?
Buyer: Yes, but only if you can assure me you can have a smaller variation in the size.
Me: No problem. Sign here, please.
If this sounds ridiculous to you, welcome to my world…
I don’t remember quite how long ago I first read this book, but today I just had to go and pull it off the shelf in my office at work where it normally lives. Very near to the front, there it tells of one study where the authors took two pieces of corporate writing, one in typical corporate-speak, and one straight-talking and clear. The identities of the companies was not evident or otherwise discernable from the content.
They took these two pieces and showed them to a number of people in the local (to them, Atlanta) Starbucks, and asked them to select from a list of 30 words the ones that they would associate with the companies involved. There were 15 “positive” and 15 “negative” words in the list. Interestingly, the Starbucks crowd didn’t like the bull, so the four words most strongly associated with the writer of the corporate-speak were ‘obnoxious’, ‘rude’, ‘stubborn’ and ‘unreliable’. And none of the 15 “good” words were associated with this company’s literature.
The other piece fared much better — it was associated with the words: ’likable’, ’energetic’, ‘friendly’, ‘inspiring’ and ’enthusiastic’. None of the “negative” words were assoaciated with it.
Let me quote from the book:
The short story is that people find straight talkers likable, and that’s a big deal. In his book ”The Power of Persuasion”, Robert Levine, a professor of psychology, says:
If you could master just one element of personal communication that is more powerful than anything … it is the quality of being likable. I call it the magic bullet, because if your audience likes you, they’ll forgive just about everything else you might do wrong. If they don’t like you, you can hit every rule right on target and it doesn’t matter.
The authors also note that two of the words that were included in the list were “intelligent” and “educated”. There was no statistical difference between the straight-talk sample and the bull sample. This means that an attempt to appear smart by (as they put it) using fifty-cent words to make 5-cent points, is pointless — there is simply no payoff for the verbosity.
Quoting again:
The bottom line: Bullshit eats away at your personal capital, while straight talk pays dividends. Invest wisely.
Amen to that!
Today I have endured more double-speak and, well, absolute nonsense than anyone should ever need to be exposed to, because of some fear of being absolutely clear in some communications. A futile attempt at stealth management.
I’ll feel better soon.
Really I will.
