Category Archives: Culture

These posts will deal with Copyright and other cultural topics

What should a manager manage?

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Managers should not be managers of people, they must manage processes. Managers should be leaders of people not managers of people. Managing people by watching them closely is not typically a very effective method to ensure that work is completed. Micromanagement breeds mistrust between employee and manager. Through managing the quality of the processes the manager is able to increase the likelihood of success of their people.

All work is a process. Even if there doesn’t appear to be a process if the work is to be fully completed there are a series of steps that must be completed. It doesn’t have to be a good process, a repeatable process, or particularly effective but if the work is completed it followed a process. Furthermore, if more multiple people do the same type of work without a clearly defined process it’s likely that there will inconsistent results to their work. A manager owns the overall output of all the work of their employees. If the work is consistently subpar or employees have a difficult time picking up the way to do the work that is expected of them, this is the responsibility of the manager to address. It doesn’t matter how amazing the employees are, they could have been consistently excelling in a previous, if the processes are terrible those employees will not succeed.

Not every type of work can effectively be managed through traditional software. For example, software and technology development in both these are “knowledge” activities that unlikely would benefit from a highly structured process. In these cases there are two things that help manage the process. First creating a regular process of checking in, managing what work the developers should be doing, and working to eliminate roadblocks – in software this is Agile software development. Second you create a standard process to feed in consistent data into the truly creative process and consistent outputs so that the consumers of the work are able to use the output of the creative process effectively in their work.

To manage the processes managers need to equip their employees and themselves with tools to do root cause analysis, conduct structured problem solving, and rigorous process improvement. Managers need to take ownership of the end to end process, the data their employees use to complete their work, and the quality of the results. It is important that this becomes the norm as it will switch blame from people, who generally want to do the right thing, to the process and how work is completed.

This is not to say that whenever people deviate from the agreed upon process that the manager shouldn’t address that or if people still fail to meet expectations while working in the process that they can’t be fired. However, leading employees to identify broken processes, supporting them in fixing them, and providing tools to do so becomes the role of the manager rather than micromanaging their employees.

Businesses and Silver Bullets

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I’ve been teaching Lean Process Improvement or Six Sigma for about 6 years now. I’m getting into learning Agile in a pretty deep way through reading a ton of books, seeing it in action, and working with Agile teams. I’m currently learning Business Architecture/Enterprise Architecture as well. All of these methodologies are similar but different in some dramatic ways. Lean itself isn’t a project management solution, it has some features of it, but the goal is to take action put something in place and measure the results. Inherently, you’re supposed to be done as soon as possible. Six Sigma has some pretty strong Project management capabilities built into it, but it’s not to be used to install software or some other type of function, it’s design to solve a complex problem, prevent it from happening again and moving on. Agile is totally about managing projects while with as little overhead as possible, while maximizing visibility. This is done through frequent light weight touches and less frequent demos. Finally business architecture is about defining the structure of the business then identifying root causes. I’m the least impressed with Business Architecture at this point because it seems to have the objective of keeping the people at the top in charge while minimizing the amount of empowerment throughout the organization. That’s just my first brush with it though and I could be wrong. The other methodologies are all about empowering the team and the people doing the work so they can be as effective as possible. With Lean and Six Sigma the goal is to eliminate your own job if you’re an instructor or internal consultant, it doesn’t seem the be the case with Business Architecture.

Regardless, all of these methodologies indicate that our businesses are extremely sick. It’s becoming pretty clear to me that the vast majority of current state business practices are flawed and leading to under performing businesses. Lean Six Sigma, makes it clear that there are out dated and poor performing processes. Agile makes it clear that traditional software development doesn’t work and is much too expensive. Business Architecture indicates that no one knows what people are doing, why they are doing it, or where other parts of the organization are doing the same type of work.

In many cases some of the problems looking to be solved by Business Architecture are eliminated in a true Lean organization, but not always. I believe that is why Lean Startup methodology is becoming so popular in both new and old businesses. It’s a novel way to force change in an existing company, while in a Startup it helps keep the company healthy much longer. Furthermore, it forces the company to build effective organization structures early and continually test them.

With the majority of businesses being unhealthy due to out dated processes or aging systems, it’s no wonder why organizations are always looking for a silver bullet. They need a quick fix because nothing is working correctly. The goal to continually drive more and more profits prevents leaders from taking a hard look at what they are doing. Forcing investment in doing the right thing the first time or to do the right thing for the organization even if it takes more time and potentially money.

With my current process improvement classes and engagements I’m seeing a continually struggle between the way you should do Lean, focus on changing what you can, and the reality that most of the work is being done through systems. Even if I wanted to improve processes around the system there’s a limit to what I can do, because I cannot effect change on the underlying system. Changing those systems either IT or organizational can be impossible to do without a strong organizational will and clear strategy. Without either of those, any improvement or agile effort is doomed to fail.

More than two sides, the complexity of a story

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In a lot of my writing, I typically focus on one aspect of the story. For example, with my writing about Ferguson I really focused on the wrong that I believed the police were doing. I didn’t really touch on the violence that the protesters were doing to the community (contained to the first few days) or the violence they were committing on the police. I didn’t ignore it personally, or as I was thinking about the articles, I just didn’t want to discuss it because it didn’t fit with the story I was trying to outline. That’s perfectly fine. You can’t fit everything into any given story. However, that doesn’t mean that omission was support of the actions of the protesters. I abhor their behavior and I think that it really negatively impacted their message. 

The past few days, we’ve had some pretty serious leaks. Over 100 celebrities have had their nude images leaked. The suspected culprit is iCloud. The iPhone, like most Android phones have the option to automatically backup your photos to a storage unit online. Apparently, there was a vulnerability in an application called Find My Phone, which allowed a person to try as many times as they wanted to access an account. What this meant was that brute force methods for cracking a login for an account would work eventually. It might have taken days or longer for whatever algorithm was used to crack the logins, but eventually it would have worked. There’s no way for it not. Essentially, the approach would run through as many permutations as possible for the login. furthermore, it could have actually been run concurrently on multiple different systems to test in parallel. It’s pretty horrible that someone was able to sneak into iCloud and steal these pictures, however, it’s also incumbent on the users of these systems and the owners of the systems to ensure that these simple lapses don’t happen. 

The users of these services bare a responsibility for understanding what is happening to their data once it leaves their phones. This is a requirement for any user, not just the famous. The famous likely should have someone help them with their security features, as it’s unlikely that many of them have the desire or knowledge to do it on their own. Not that this is any different for much of the rest of the population. They are as vulnerable as the famous, but aren’t a target simply by being uninteresting. 

In both cases, it’s fully acceptable to be upset by both sides of the story. It’s not impossible to say that police violence and militarization is bad and that the criminal element of the Ferguson protests is bad too. It’s also fine to say that you shouldn’t hack and that the people that develop the systems and use the systems are accountable as well. In most of our stories, there are complexities that are withheld or ignored because there is an angle the writer is going for, the story would take too long, or the writer has a low opinion of the readers. In my case, I was going for a specific angle with the Ferguson stories, because I assumed that it was obvious to the reader that the violence committed by the protesters was both known and understood to be a terrible wrong. Not mentioning it did make the police seem less rational than they were behaving though.

In the case of the leaks, most of the attention has been put on the leaker and the people enjoying the leaks, however, it’s important that we keep in mind that there’s a responsibility of the companies to keep that data safe. 

It’s not about the money, it’s about sending a message

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The Joker said it best in The Dark Knight. Destroying something that people care deeply about wakes them up. Gets them to pay attention. I think the recent events have woken people up in a lot of ways because it’s driven something home that would have otherwise been a misunderstood topic. A few days ago I wrote a blog about the militarization of police in that blog I compared a positive and a negative example of this (Boston and Ferguson). This has been getting a lot of interest lately because of the seeming disconnected in the amount of force actually required and the display of force on hand (especially considering the US government doesn’t think displays of force like this are effective for de-escalating situations). I do think that the protests would have started to draw less attention as time went on – in a similar fashion to the Occupy Wall Street protests fizzled out, however, the fact that the Police started to threaten and arrest a large number of journalists, made the news because the news itself was being threatened.

If we’re honest with ourselves we have to admit that the police killing a young blackman really isn’t news. It happens so often in the US that we rarely see it at a national level. We’d hear about it if it was a white guy (unless he was a drug user) or a white woman. Since it’s just another black kid, we don’t hear about it. However, attention stayed in the area because first amendment rights started to be restricted by the government. I know that a judge ruled that it was a special area which allowed some restrictions on where the press could go, but that’s exactly what the first amendment was supposed to defend the press against. It’s a type of prior restraint.

The press helped make this story bigger than it normally would have been by getting targeted by police. The fact that the news itself became the news to many of the people watching on Twitter rather than the message of the protesters is sad, but I’m glad that it was able to keep the attention on the protests in a way that have been some what constructive. It’s starting to force us to actually have a conversation about what sorts of equipment our police officers need. In an interview with the former Seattle Police Chief that oversaw a similar sort of confrontation in 1999 over the World Trade Organization, he argued that what needed to happen was a reduction in arms on the police side. He further argued that there is a great deal of racism in our police forces, not initially intentionally, but through learned fear and through common language in the departments. This is partially a result of the “Us vs. Them” mentality that results whenever two groups are continual conflict – anyone that might be part of the other group is part of that group. Because the War Against Drugs has primarily impacted the black communities, this has pitted the police against the black communities. It is likely part of the reason we have a lack of diversity in our police forces.

We’re finding in other portions of our society similar sorts of either intentional or accidental bias. Looking at the populations of the largest tech companies in the world we see the same sort of biases and segregations. In many cases it is because these selections become path dependent. People end up hiring friends and pulling in more people that look like them. Creating a larger problem and then HR has to step in and it’s a forced issue and people might question why a person was hired in appropriately.

The police have shined this light on themselves through their brutal responses where they show a clear lack of understanding of the people they are expected to be protecting and serving. Their actions, which should be protecting the press as well, have made sure that the press is going to be paying very close attention to all of their actions in the next few years. Furthermore, anything like the killing of another black man in the St. Louis area will result in extra scrutiny.

I think that killing that man ended up sending a message as much as taking away the rights of the protesters and press (both first amendments). The police don’t care and can act with impunity against the black community. They don’t care what the press does they will block Freedom of Information requests, prevent the press from filming their actions, and arrest anyone that gets in their way. A message has been sent. How we react is important to the future health of our press, our communities, and our freedom.

Silicon valley, new tech, and how we use it

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Last night as I was watching Hulu, an interesting comercial came on that was all about jabbing Silicon Valley and its love for the newest of the new. I think it was for a new Toshiba Tablet. This comercial was really self-aware of the environment in which they sell as well as the types of people they are actually trying to sell their devices to. I think that the commercial also does a great job pointing out that the Internet of Things and 3d Printing both might be part of a hype machine that is out of control. All of these technologies could do great things, but they aren’t preordained to do anything amazing. It’s up to the user to really enable that.

I think that the book I’m reading “Enchanted Objects” does a bit of this as well. I’m torn if I should love these ideas or hate them. The Smart scissors mentioned in that ad would definitely fit under the definition of Enchanted Objects because it’s something ordinary that through sensors, haptic feedback or other do-hickeys has some extra-ordinary capabilities. Many of these things seem gimicky and unlikely to catch on. Others, like the author’s Glow Pill – which is a lid for a pill container to remind people to take their pills – would be really helpful to a lot of people out there.

I also agree with the author’s sentiment that the black screens we peer into day in and day out, are somewhat ugly, unweildy and have never lifted up to their hype. Which means that they likely haven’t made our lives significantly better and mostly just incrementally. I think this is born out through the drop in sales in tablets, the saturation of the smart phone market, and the resurgance of sales in PCs. People have found the tablet ecosystem limited in someway and awkward to use and have opted to refresh their capability with a cheap laptop rather than springing for a new tablet (an exception to this trend could be a Surface 3, but we’ll see how that pans out in the long term). Another concern with all these devices is of course security and safety from prying eyes. I’ve been talking about this for a number of years, but I believe that people will actually start listening after seeing the result of the Ferguson MO police action. Your twitter feed and location is on twitter, the police can find that. What other data are you sharing out there without truly understanding it. How can it be used against you by a militarized local government?

I think much of this goes back to my questions of ethics and technology. At what point does a technology become unethical or, rather, the use of a technology become unethical? Is a smart trashcan ethical because it helps you save the environment and support local business, what happens if that impacts your taxes or gets you on an eco-terror watch list? We don’t understand how our data is being used and to me that is scary.

I think this is played out a great deal with the fact that AirBnB, Uber, Lyft, and similar sites are the biggest booming sites in Silicon Valley. These aren’t truly technological innovations, they are business model innovations, which is why they are so devastating. Sure they are leveraging technology in an appealing way, but they aren’t really technology companies. Their innovation is in the way they engage with their customers, the delivery method is the same in many cases, a room or a car, as their competitors. The competitors haven’t been able to figure out how to combine the nimbleness of the app with a dynamic business model. Based on historical evidence, it’s unlikely that they will be able to catch up and compete. Which is fine, because I’m sure their data usages will be as opaque as the new companies. We don’t know how they are collecting our data or what they are doing with it.