First Lines of Michael Gerber's "The E-Myth Revisited"

 "The E-Myth is the myth of the entrepreneur. It runs deep in this country and rings of the heroic. 

Picture the typical entrepreneur and Herculean pictures come to mind...

The legend reeks of nobility, of lofty, extra-human efforts, of a prodigious commitment to larger-than-life ideals. 

Well, while there are such people, my experience tells me they are rare."

- Michael Gerber, "The E-Myth Revisited"

Recommended as an excellent summary of what it means to work ON a business (as opposed to working IN a business), Gerber's book is extremely enlightening for someone who is trying to start his own business. Amongst a ton of insights, the most valuable one for me (so far) are the three integral business personas needed to be successful:

1. Entrepreneur. The one with the vision, that dreams of what the business could be.
   
2. Manager. The one that takes care of the tactical nuts-and-bolts of making the business run.
   
3. Technician. The one that does the work, that creates the product or deliver the service.

Many small businesses are started by technicians who dream of being their own bosses. But without cultivating the other mindsets, such people may be doomed to ever-increasing workloads without achieving the goals they set out for the business.

Reality as a Network of Processes

 "Reality is not a collection of things, it’s a network of processes.

If this is correct...we understand reality better if we think of it in terms of interactions, not individuals. We, as individuals, exist thanks to the interactions we are involved in. This is why, in classic game theory, the winners in the long run are those who collaborate.

Too often we foolishly measure success in terms of a single actor’s fortunes. This is both short-sighted and irrational."

- Carlo Rovelli

I read this as "pay attention to your relationships." Between people. Between institutions. Between systems. And between people, institutions, and systems. This environment of relationships defines what actions you take or your "success" more than anything else. As W. Edwards Deming put it: "A bad system will beat a good person every time."

First Lines of Cal Newport's "Deep Work"

"In the Swiss canton of St. Gallen, near the northern banks of Lake Zurich, is a village named Bollingen. In 1922, the psychiatrist Carl Jung chose this spot to begin building a retreat. He began with a basic two-story stone house he called the Tower. After returning from a trip to India, where he observed the practice of adding meditation rooms to homes, he expanded the complex to include a private office."

- Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

This useful book has helped me in a number of ways already - and I'm only 75% completed. First, it provides an inspirational picture of what we can do if we can conduct "Deep Work" - what Newport defines as "Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit." He provides a lot of detail, but mainly the culprit in our inability to conduct Deep Work is in what he calls "network tools... constantly sending and receiving e-mail messages like human network routers, with frequent breaks for quick hits of distraction." The best part though is that he provides four rules for building your ability to conduct Deep Work: 

1. Work Deeply.
2. Embrace Boredom
3. Quit Social Media
4. Drain the Shallows 
   

Diversity was Necessary

I was astounded by the sublimity of this vision [of social Darwinism in business], whose implications spread far beyond the business sphere. Thinking back to my first discussion with Riley, I wondered if this weren't the answer to the question he’d proposed: How was the Christian to reconcile the existence of evil with the unconditional benignancy of God? Or, alternatively, how did the Taoist reconcile the existence of what was not Tao – which represented an affront to its essential nature, even contradicted it – with the primordial unity of all things in Tao? Was it possible that this was the answer? If so, then on both counts the objections were based on a simple narrowness of view. Once the Great Whole was seen, objections flew away like chaff. Evil, then, was the crucible in which the good was tried and proved. The unnatural was the fever which the body suffered internally to purify itself and become well again. The sores and the corrupt places of the economic world, as of the larger, were where the Tao had sent the legions of its influence, its platelets and leukocytes, its antibodies and white corpuscles, to eradicate diversity’s failed experiments, devouring the excesses of the blood. Diversity was necessary to insure the greatest possible perfection, and if it created a few monstrosities as well, then it all provided  for their destruction by natural selection. That was the miracle! Everything was tending towards the good!

- David Payne, Confessions from a Taoist on Wall Street, p. 577

Managing in Agile Scrum

Being a manager in an Agile environment is a bit like taking your first child home from the hospital. You have a general sense of what you need to do, and a lot of people giving you advice, but no really specific guidelines.  So what’s the best way to make sense of the role?

First of all, it’s normal to feel confused when first managing people working in Agile Scrum. After all, the Scrum framework only includes three roles, none of which is a manager. In fact, it’s common for Scrum Teams to shut out managers because they are not clear what their role is. What these people are missing is that when done right, managers have a lot to offer Scrum Teams, and are essential in the effective running of an enterprise company.

Managers can help drive a high-performance organization by moving away from a command and control mindset to one that is principles driven. This means less focusing on the specific actions that your teams are performing as it is guiding and incrementally improving the system within which the teams work.  Some examples of this might include:

• Support implementing engineering practices like automated testing and continuous integration so that teams can spend less time on routine tasks and focus on creating truly innovative software. 
• Listen closely to teams and remove the structural and process problems that they say are holding them back. This may mean protecting them from disruptions.
• Provide a larger context for your employee’s work, helping them to connect what they are working on into a cohesive, company-wide picture. 
• Design or support work routines that allow for code refactoring – although it would be up to the team to figure out exactly what would be refactored.
• Build a bridge between the product management strategy and what teams can deliver.
• Use Performance Management to align your teams to where the company will need to be six months or even years in the future. For instance, do we have the right people in the right jobs? Do they have the skills and technology they need to succeed?

As a manager, only by combining these various skills together into a web of support for the people you manage will you help them to navigate the rough waters of modern software development. Managers can guide the change the organization needs to be successful. And while you may make some mistakes along the way, that's okay - as long as you take it upon yourself to get better every day, carrying everyone along with you, the organization will be in a better place tomorrow then we are today. Good luck!

Related Posts:
The Paradox at the Heart of Scrum
The Science of Innovation

Why Worry?

"Worrying is an abuse of our imaginative power."

- Jan-Willem Van Den Brandhof, the author of The Business Brain Book. His class and book changed the way I go about learning for myself as well as how I design training for others. Expensive, but you can see a summary of the book and his program at his BrainStudio website.

Four Elements of Critical Thinking

My favorite Bumper Sticker Motto is "Question Authority," so it shouldn't come as any surprise that I'm a big fan of critical thinking. With this in mind, I liked Paul Schoemaker's article 4 Secrets of Critical Thinkers, where he writes:

In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman attributes shallow framing to people substituting easy questions for hard ones. We often miss the crux of the issue by drawing imaginary connections between what we see and what we expect to see. As our own book Winning Decisions explains, the essence of critical thinking is to slow down this process, learn how to reframe problems, see beyond the familiar and focus on what is unique in any important decision situation. Here are four ways to hone these critical thinking skills:

1. Slow down
2. Break from the pack. 
3. Encourage disagreement. 
4. Engage with mavericks. 

These four points are expanded in the article. I know that i'd be ecstatic if my company committed to even two of these important four points.

Why Big Companies Die

I found truth in this article by Peggy Noonan. She makes two basic points. One is from Steve Jobs:

[Jobs] has a theory about “why decline happens” at great companies: “The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesman, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues.” So salesmen are put in charge, and product engineers and designers feel demoted: Their efforts are no longer at the white-hot center of the company’s daily life. They “turn off.”

Noonan adds "accountants and the money men" to Jobs' theory:

...[they] search the firm high and low to find new and ingenious ways to cut costs or even eliminate paying taxes. The activities of these people further dispirit the creators, the product engineers and designers, and also crimp the firm’s ability to add value to its customers. But because the accountants appear to be adding to the firm’s short-term profitability, as a class they are also celebrated and well-rewarded, even as their activities systematically kill the firm’s future.

When the people that do the work aren't valued, then the products suffer, and what is a company without it's products? It's why I think Agile Scrum is such an effective software development process; by pushing decisions down to the lowest possible level, you let people who are actually informed about the subjects (the "boots on the ground") make informed decisions rather than choosing directions based on executive summaries or spreadsheets. While you have to be careful to keep the focus on the customer (don't let the Inmates Run the Asylum), Jobs demonstrated that keeping a company's focus on adding customer value - another goal of Agile Scrum - is a path to continued success.