Compound Thinking

Why MBA “Stars” Don’t Necessarily Make Good Managers

I was reading Bob Sutton’s blog and I was reminded of another reason why top notch MBA candidates are not always the best team members let alone managers.

Unfortunately, the students who get into fancy schools like MIT and Stanford and are evaluated both before and after they arrive largely on their individual performance: BUT then life plays a cruel trick on them, forcing them to work in groups, to deal with the messiness and sometimes craziness of human groups — and their individual brilliance is no longer enough and they have all those damn people, with different needs, opinions, priorities, and skills, and different schedules too, to deal with.

If you’ve been selected and groomed based on one set of standards (individual performance) it’s hard to accept that those old standards don’t work any more and your success will be based on a new standard: the ability to work with a group to create, innovate and ultimately produce results as a team.

Individual performance is based on a different set of skills, talents, and motivations than group collaboration. So even if you can make the internal switch to accept the new standards, you aren’t necessarily going to have the right kind of motivation, the right skills, or the right talents to succeed at collaborative work.

Management isn’t easy, it’s hard work that requires really understanding people, their individual strengths and weaknesses, and creatively organizing them to accomplish things as a group that none of them could accomplish on their own. Unfortunately that’s just not what they teach in school, so you have to learn it somewhere else.

Code Mash

Some friends of mine are putting together a non-denominational developers conference called code-mash in Ohio this January.

Looks like Python and Ruby are both going to have a good number of talks. I’ll be talking about SQLAlchemy, which is the best object relational mapper I’ve ever seen. There’ll be talks about Test Driven Development in Python, Enterprise Architectural Patterns for Python developers, along with lots of cool talks about Lean Software Development, the side benefits of Test Driven development.

You can still submit a talk proposal before November 30th, and you’ll get free room and board. I think it would be great to see somebody talk about Dabo and Desktop application Development in Python, and they seem to be missing any talk about OSX/Cocoa stuff, which I’m sure is because they haven’t had any proposals yet.

It would also be nice to see a good cross platform development with Mono talk…

I’m really excited by the opportunity to get developers of all kinds together and talk about how to be productive and learn more about the strengths and weaknesses of the various tools/frameworks people are using.

What’s wrong with MBAs?

I know it’s popular for programmers to bash Managers, and MBAs. And I don’t want to jump on the bandwagon –especially since I’m also a manager.

But I know that the image of the pointy haired boss is pretty thoroughly ingrained in our culture, and popular mythology exists to explain a shared experience.

Clearly there are a lot of bad managers with MBA’s from prestigious institutions out there.

Henry Mintzberg does more to explain how this happened — and what we might be able to do about it — than anybody else I’ve read recently.

The central argument of Managers not MBAs is that Management as taught by MBA programs is a failure, because they:

• choose the wrong people,
• educate them in the wrong way
• and produce the wrong results.

In other words, the selection process and educational format of most MBA programs actively undermines the practice of good management. MBA’s are a self-selected group of people who “want to get ahead in business,” and the entire program teaches them to compete rather than cooperate.

The result is that graduates of MBA programs have a pretty dismal record at actually starting, expanding, or maintaining stable, productive, businesses.

Mintzberg doesn’t blame MBA holders — they were taught strategy, and accounting, and analysis, but never management.

In particular, MBA programs never taught them the meaning of good management, or the skills they would need to actually grow and manage teams of real people. They aren’t even pointed in the right direction, the structure of MBA programs reward the kind of people who like to compete. And years of “case study” exercises have made them into the kind of people who make snap decisions based on limited data.

MBA graduates generally aren’t the kind of people dedicated to helping other people achieve greatness.

Instead, they want to achieve greatness on their own — which can be a worthy goal. It’s just a terrible goal for a manager. Good managers are relentlessly focused on helping the people they work for perform at their best.

I don’t believe an MBA degree is just a liability.

The MBA’s I know have learned useful terminology, analytical skills, and the training they recieved in in economics, accounting, and business law can be a huge help in the right moment.

An MBA can prove to be an net asset to a manager, but only if you unlearn some skills they teach you (snap judgments, and me-first competitiveness) and make it a point to learn the “soft” skills that are infinitely more important.

The second half of Mintzberg’s book is his proposal for creating better educational institutions, which can identify the right candidates, train them with the right skills in the right way, and ultimately produce much better results than current MBA programs. The broad outline of that plan seems right. But most managers need something they can use to get better at their jobs right now, without spending a lot of money.

• Never stop learning from the people on your team – they are on the front lines learning every day, if you’re not working to learn from them, your loosing potentially critical information.
• Always believe that there is more to their job than making money. Greatness comes from productive passion, and greed doesn’t inspire passion or loyalty.
• Elevate the people who actually produce value — These people actually do the work, and they know infinitely more about the nature of that work than MBA trained managers, so they should be respected, valued, and included (or put in charge) of improvement processes.

Good managers care about people, not head-count, and they strive to make their job a meaningful contribution to a shared vision.

Hopefully I’ll have time to write more about good management tomorrow.

So what is vision?

It’s a shared look at the future, and it is a future filled with hope and promise.

If your future looks bright, make sure your team knows about it. Tell the story of how you achieved all this, thank the people who helped you get there.

If on the other hand your company’s immediate future is bleak you can still encourage vision, but you have to creatively and courageously tell stories. I’ve been through this kind of thing at work, and we did come out stronger.

Unfortunately I can’t tell that story.  Fortunately I thought of an even better story to articulate this idea of vision.

In a country where segregation was the law of the land, and racial hate was rampant Martin Luther King Jr, continued to tell the story of a future where people would no longer be judged by the color of their skin.  He continued to tell these stories in the face of economic hardship, and in under the the constant threat of assassination, and with the memory of attacks on his family still burned deeply into his memory.  It is context that  Martin Luther King Jr. made one of his most powerful speeches to his battle weary friends and followers:

Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead.

But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop…

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.

If you are faced with a Death March style project, the only thing you can do is to hold out a vision for a better future and do everything in your power to make that happen. You can’t ignore the present, you can’t ignore the grueling overtime, the unrealistic deadlines, or the managerial mistakes that got you here — if you do nobody will listen to you, nobody will respect what you have to say.  Instead, you have to demonstrate that you have or can come up with a plan to get out of the desert into the promised land.   Compelling vision begins with the hard truth of today, but holds up an achievable hope for tomorrow.

Automation: Doing the wrong thing — faster!

Automation is like optimization, so I would like to invent a corollary to the Horre’s famous Maxim:

Premature automation is also the root of even more evil

If you spend time and money to optimize the performance of a particular piece of code, it will often become more complex, more difficult to understand, and more costly to change in the future.

The same thing happens when you automate a sales process, or the way you route phone calls. The process becomes less adaptable to change, sub-processes are invented to route around difficulties with the main automated process, and can get crazy.
Sure, you can get things done more quickly. But if you’re customers are routed incorrectly, they don’t care how quickly they get to talk to the wrong person!

And the danger is not just that you’ll get it wrong in the first place, but that you won’t be able to adapt to changes in the environment around you because adaptation would mean throwing out all the work that went into optimizing that process.

Some of this problem is economic.

The cost of automating a process must be repaid quickly for the automation work to be valuable. The exact ROI time is function of how much change happens in that area of your business.

But some of it is psycho-social.

Even if a particular automation project has already paid for itself, the fact that it exists makes the whole organization more likely to resist change, because you don’t want to ‘throw away’ all the hard work that went into automating the old process.

Not only that, if it’s not handled well by management, seeing a project you worked on for months last year being “thrown away” can be seriously demotivating to the automator.

Premature automation is the root of all kinds of evil.