Compound Thinking

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.

Software, Politics, and Voting Machines

Recently there was a discussion of Electronic Voting Machines on NPR. My informed opinion: The current wave of computer based voting machines is a political disaster waiting to happen. I don’t care which party you are in, if you care about democracy, and should care about voting machine technology.

There’s no such thing as a totally secure computer environment, and a recent study shows how easy it is to subvert one modern voting machine. But don’t let the fact that they only broke into one brand of machine fool you, nobody is going to make a totally secure voting system. When the stakes are high enough, whatever security you have will be hacked, and we’ll have voter fraud. And even if you could be 100% sure that the machine wasn’t tampered with, it’s impossible to be completely sure no bugs have screwed up the totals?

As Software professionals, we need to speak with one voice on this issue. Bruce Schneider explains what we all pretty much already know:

Computer security experts are unanimous on what to do…

1. DRE machines must have a voter-verifiable paper audit trails…
2. Software used on DRE machines must be open to public scrutiny…

I know I’m pretty much preaching to the choir on this blog, but I’m also commiting to explaining the need for voter-verifiable paper trails to a dozen non-technical people over the next two weeks. If you can, I’d ask you to do the same thing. And if you have a blog, please ask your readers to do the same thing.

This isn’t about party loyalty, it’s about preserving democracy.

Users are more important than potential users!

This ought to be obvious.   But as Kathy Sierra mentions it is clear that not all companies are thinking things through.

How many products have you bought with million dollar marketing budgets, and not enough money to create a manual written in something resembling english, with reasonable diagrams?

Users are your best advocates, word-of-mouth only works if your users have a great experience.  As Kathy would say, if you help your users “kick ass” they will tell their friends.

Which brings me to my real point, manuals are important, but most of the time people expect them to suck and they don’t even read them.   So, even if you write great manuals, you need to think about how to market your manual to your users.

This isn’t some hypothetical post.  The software we sell at Humantech has fantastic manuals, which we spend a lot of time and money polishing up, and they work!

I’ve yet to have a support call from a user who read the manual, and nearly every support call can be solved by reference to the manual.    But people still don’t read the manual unless we prompt them.

I can usually “sell” the idea of reading the manual to any given user in the space of a support call, and once they read it they always thank me.  But we need to find ways to make our manual more “attractive” so that new users actually read it without need to be individually “sold” on the idea.
Let me know if you have any ideas/experience marketing your manuals to your users.

It’s a pretty high priority for me right now because I’m convinced that it could free up quite a bit of time and help our users have an even better experience with our software.

Too much to do

I’m finishing up the last little bit of the TurboGears book, hiring new people at work, moving at home, and trying to keep everything together.

Thank heavens I found Getting Things Done last year — without a trusted system outside of my head for all my to-do items my life would be falling apart and my stress level would be insane.

In about a week I’ll be able to get back to blogging, and I have a half dozen article stubs just waiting for a little bit of attention, so I hope it will be worth the wait!

Build teams, not products!

I think Jared is right on target with this statement:

“I don’t grow apples. I grow apple trees.” One is a result of the other. Overly focusing on the apple can cost you the tree.” –Jared Richardson

If you throw together a team to build a product, you might get lucky and create a great product. If you are really lucky you’ll get a great team that works well together, is motivated to build amazing software, and is starting to learn and grow as a group — not just as individuals.

Unfortunately, the next step most companies take is to pull that team apart, promote some of them, and try to start all over again new products with new teams. This is a colossal waste of time and money. Great companies find ways to re-use existing teams who have already learned to work effectively as a team. I’ve found that small companies, who have no choice but to re-use the same teams over and over again, have a competitive advantage over their larger competitors who constantly reshuffle their product development teams.

If you constantly grow your capacity to build great things, your competitors will always be playing catchup. But if you slow down and focus on your current cash cow the milk will eventually dry up.