If you've worked at Microsoft a day or a decade, you know what Fire Drills do your productivity, sanity and management fealty.
Like death and taxes, there is a certain amount of generally accepted pain that comes with the territory around fire drills. It is as if everyone involved knows that it could have been avoided if a decision had been made earlier, or if the ramifications were truly considered or if an ego had been checked.
I, and many of my colleagues, recognize that the business world is a messy place and true fire drills are unavoidable. That's just life. But while Microsoft moves at the speed of thought, many managers just aren't being very thoughtful when it comes to understanding how their decisions ripple down through the organization.
For those on the outside looking in, the Microsoft Fire Drill goes something like this.
Manager X decides that: (Pick one)
A) It is time to change strategy on a product, project or campaign
B) Since budget shifted, the group has to drop some work and take on other duties
C) The product, project or campaign currently under executive review prior to launch needs "minor changes"
D) All of the above
And then all the IC's and some layers of management scramble around to turn the battleship, screw another team and help someone feel like they contributed, while everything else they are supposed to be doing gets put on the back burner. This has the devilish effect of sometimes making those items on the back burner generate their own fire drills due to boiling over from neglect.
Would it be any surprise that one of the management training classes at Microsoft is presentation skills, with a particular emphasis on making outstanding PowerPoint presentations.
(Truth in HRWeb advertising would instead title the class, "PowerPoint for Pointy Heads.")
Would it be a further surprise that most of the PowerPoint decks that float through my inbox are so terrible in aspect that I reflexively clutch my lingam so that my soul is not sucked out through my eyeballs when I view them? Would it stretch credulity to the breaking point to point out that many Fire Drills have their very own PowerPoint accompaniment?
If only we had an effective evacuation plan!
My third request of management and leadership is to snuff out fire drills by learning some Management 101 skills:
Good managers don't create fires, but do put them out.
Good managers don't make decisions that cause other groups to go into fire drill mode. They make decisions that cause the competition to do so.
Good managers don't micromanage but do keep their pulse on things in order to avoid last-minute changes.
And put a bloody pox on using PowerPoint decks for internal communications!
20 July, 2006
13 July, 2006
Intel Leads the Way
Paul Otellini, CEO of Intel, in a sterling example of receiving and acting on a clue, will be laying off approximately 1,000 managers. Why? According to an Intel spokesperson, "We have too many management layers from the top of the company to the first line of supervisors to be effective," and, "Over the last five years at Intel, the number of managers has grown faster than our overall employee population." (Emphasis mine.)
Now where else does this also seem to be a problem?
One guess only, dear reader.
It's unfortunate that one thousand or so people won't have a job in a few weeks, but when you have cancer, sometimes you have to cut some of the good flesh away to ensure you removed the entire tumor. Otherwise, you get unchecked growth that makes later surgery that much more difficult.
In a world where even the U.S. military is trying to streamline its managerial structure, Microsoft continues to support its deep organizational tree. Those inside the organization can confirm this by digging through HeadTrax or the Global Address Book (GAB) to count the managerial levels -- I've found up to thirteen.
Even other Softies agree that things are broken in management-land, and that there are too many monkeys in the tree.
Keep them around, and we'll continue to bog down in pointy-hair types who will "process" us to death. Trim the ranks and flatten, and we might just see an outbreak of managing and leading.
My second request of of management and leadership at Microsoft: flatten the organization proactively before market forces force us to do so reactively.
Now where else does this also seem to be a problem?
One guess only, dear reader.
It's unfortunate that one thousand or so people won't have a job in a few weeks, but when you have cancer, sometimes you have to cut some of the good flesh away to ensure you removed the entire tumor. Otherwise, you get unchecked growth that makes later surgery that much more difficult.
In a world where even the U.S. military is trying to streamline its managerial structure, Microsoft continues to support its deep organizational tree. Those inside the organization can confirm this by digging through HeadTrax or the Global Address Book (GAB) to count the managerial levels -- I've found up to thirteen.
Even other Softies agree that things are broken in management-land, and that there are too many monkeys in the tree.
Keep them around, and we'll continue to bog down in pointy-hair types who will "process" us to death. Trim the ranks and flatten, and we might just see an outbreak of managing and leading.
My second request of of management and leadership at Microsoft: flatten the organization proactively before market forces force us to do so reactively.
12 July, 2006
Whither Microsoft's Management Style?
Peter Drucker studied GM as they struggled to change their military-industrial, command-production management model installed during WWII into the decentralized, loosely-coupled business unit structure that most modern corporations emulate to this day.
Credited with minting the term "knowledge worker", Drucker influenced all sorts of people, including Bill Gates. Probably Drucker's largest legacy at Microsoft is management by objectives, in which management and employees (otherwise known as ICs, or Individual Contributors in Microsoft-speak,) work on aligned goals for the greater good. Drucker felt that these goals should fit into the SMART (specific, measurable, agreed, realistic and time-sensitive) framework.
More's the pity then that key tenets of Drucker's thinking seem to be actively ignored at Microsoft, and even SMART has been bent by the reality distortion field generator buried beneath building 34.
Drucker was big on keeping things simple and pointed out that many companies produce too many products, hire too many employees and generally expand into markets that they shouldn't.
So why has Microsoft shown a willingness to hop into any market?
I think it's because of greed.
Power and money creates its own gravity, and having quite a bit of either causes any other closely available money and power to accrete. Accrete enough, and it starts its own fusion reaction, and it will then greedily consume all freely available energy until the energy source is gone. This cycle is repeated across the universe, from stars to exploitative business practices. Microsoft has not been immune from this behavior.
The other thing that (enough) gravity will do for you is bend light.
To fuse Drucker, cosmological oddities and Microsoft's management, I argue that Microsoft's gravity of market power and vaults of cash have bent reality around senior leadership so far that they're able to see stars from behind their teeth and it's only their incessant yapping about how great things are that lets them see any light at all.
It's a well-accepted fact both inside and outside of the company that Microsoft's leaders tend to be reactive to most market opportunities, not proactive, and that when faced with a challenge, the first reaction is to assault it head-on, swinging the mass of the company in front of them to give them enough time to figure out how to absorb the challenge.
You see, greed is about having it all to the exclusion of other things in life to the point of paranoia, and whenever another company comes along and finds another way to extract wealth via software, Microsoft responds like a pit bull protecting a crack house.
The DNA of the company is bound so tightly to selling machine code that it's no wonder that it flails about whenever it tries to do anything different, and that many rank-and-file ICs within the company shrug their shoulders and say, "There they go again."
The issue, of course, is not the course of action leadership at Microsoft usually takes, but how it goes about taking that action. As an employee, I read about company issues in the trade and general press, blogs, forums and see it discussed on the nightly news some days. What I rarely receive is a Q&A talking about why the company has committed itself to a certain course of action and how it fits into the overall corporate strategy for future success.
As a rank-and-filer, I'm left to divine top-level strategy from press releases and external commentators. Worse yet, the only rational, external analysis for Microsoft's actions at times seems to be reduced to the antipodes of either it's a multi-billion dollar market that we're not in or another company that does software found a multi-billion dollar market that we're not in.
So, Drucker be damned, Microsoft enters market after market, cranks out product after product and hires like crazy to cover these two bases.
(I pray at night that BP doesn't decide to enter the software industry, lest I end up on some off-shore platform in the middle of some future global hotspot as some sort of digital roughneck.)
Every day, Microsoft has an opportunity to change for the future, but only if the leaders lead us there. Instead, it seems as if we are on the same well-trod path, being asked again and again to put our trust in our wonderful leaders, but without an explanation of how long or how far until we reach our destination or even what that destination is.
I, and many others at Microsoft that I've talked to, feel we often work at cross-purposes and that we're left in the dark about where we're really going. We receive randomizing and conflicting directions and teams appear pitted against each other due to conflicting priorities. And no one is stepping forward to sort this out.
So, here's my first request of management and leadership at Microsoft: provide more transparency into the big vision, so the rest of us can get behind it, instead of wonder what it is.
Credited with minting the term "knowledge worker", Drucker influenced all sorts of people, including Bill Gates. Probably Drucker's largest legacy at Microsoft is management by objectives, in which management and employees (otherwise known as ICs, or Individual Contributors in Microsoft-speak,) work on aligned goals for the greater good. Drucker felt that these goals should fit into the SMART (specific, measurable, agreed, realistic and time-sensitive) framework.
More's the pity then that key tenets of Drucker's thinking seem to be actively ignored at Microsoft, and even SMART has been bent by the reality distortion field generator buried beneath building 34.
Drucker was big on keeping things simple and pointed out that many companies produce too many products, hire too many employees and generally expand into markets that they shouldn't.
So why has Microsoft shown a willingness to hop into any market?
I think it's because of greed.
Power and money creates its own gravity, and having quite a bit of either causes any other closely available money and power to accrete. Accrete enough, and it starts its own fusion reaction, and it will then greedily consume all freely available energy until the energy source is gone. This cycle is repeated across the universe, from stars to exploitative business practices. Microsoft has not been immune from this behavior.
The other thing that (enough) gravity will do for you is bend light.
To fuse Drucker, cosmological oddities and Microsoft's management, I argue that Microsoft's gravity of market power and vaults of cash have bent reality around senior leadership so far that they're able to see stars from behind their teeth and it's only their incessant yapping about how great things are that lets them see any light at all.
It's a well-accepted fact both inside and outside of the company that Microsoft's leaders tend to be reactive to most market opportunities, not proactive, and that when faced with a challenge, the first reaction is to assault it head-on, swinging the mass of the company in front of them to give them enough time to figure out how to absorb the challenge.
You see, greed is about having it all to the exclusion of other things in life to the point of paranoia, and whenever another company comes along and finds another way to extract wealth via software, Microsoft responds like a pit bull protecting a crack house.
The DNA of the company is bound so tightly to selling machine code that it's no wonder that it flails about whenever it tries to do anything different, and that many rank-and-file ICs within the company shrug their shoulders and say, "There they go again."
The issue, of course, is not the course of action leadership at Microsoft usually takes, but how it goes about taking that action. As an employee, I read about company issues in the trade and general press, blogs, forums and see it discussed on the nightly news some days. What I rarely receive is a Q&A talking about why the company has committed itself to a certain course of action and how it fits into the overall corporate strategy for future success.
As a rank-and-filer, I'm left to divine top-level strategy from press releases and external commentators. Worse yet, the only rational, external analysis for Microsoft's actions at times seems to be reduced to the antipodes of either it's a multi-billion dollar market that we're not in or another company that does software found a multi-billion dollar market that we're not in.
So, Drucker be damned, Microsoft enters market after market, cranks out product after product and hires like crazy to cover these two bases.
(I pray at night that BP doesn't decide to enter the software industry, lest I end up on some off-shore platform in the middle of some future global hotspot as some sort of digital roughneck.)
Every day, Microsoft has an opportunity to change for the future, but only if the leaders lead us there. Instead, it seems as if we are on the same well-trod path, being asked again and again to put our trust in our wonderful leaders, but without an explanation of how long or how far until we reach our destination or even what that destination is.
I, and many others at Microsoft that I've talked to, feel we often work at cross-purposes and that we're left in the dark about where we're really going. We receive randomizing and conflicting directions and teams appear pitted against each other due to conflicting priorities. And no one is stepping forward to sort this out.
So, here's my first request of management and leadership at Microsoft: provide more transparency into the big vision, so the rest of us can get behind it, instead of wonder what it is.
10 July, 2006
Apologies to Joseph Heller
Working at Microsoft has more than its fair share of Catch-22 moments, which are usually generated by the policy-making machine that is management.
A post-industrial corporation aligned to a military-industrial organizational ziggurat that contains its own priesthoods and secret societies that represent the most complex feudal society ever created, Microsoft's management ranges from the almost holy to the profane, the strong to the weak, and the insipid to the inspired.
Depending upon your point of view (internal or external), current management at Microsoft ranges from excellent to incompetent. A closer look reveals a more quantum mechanical view of things though: superimposed states that are both terrible and wonderful. Applying Mr. Heisenberg's lens, we see the greatest wealth creation team in history and the greatest mass destroyers of shareholder value ever.
But Microsoft has always been about extremes. Never content to sit in the comfortable middle, it thrives at the boundary layer, gulping oxygen when it can, but sometimes it just burns.
Recently, from this Softie's viewpoint, It burns us, yes it does.
Senior leadership is without a clue and mostly absent, and this has left the rank-and-file managers to figure it out on their own.
This is a sorry state of affairs.
So, in the interest of trying to help kick-start a moribund leadership culture back into what HR wonks called "engagement", the goal of my blog is to shine that spotlight into the dark nooks and crannies of leadership and management at Microsoft, and find constructive ways to break up the logjam that is a multi-billion dollar impacted management team.
Ground rules: constructive comments only, please. Comments are being moderated. Stay on topic.
Stand by for part one: Whither Microsoft's Management Style?
A post-industrial corporation aligned to a military-industrial organizational ziggurat that contains its own priesthoods and secret societies that represent the most complex feudal society ever created, Microsoft's management ranges from the almost holy to the profane, the strong to the weak, and the insipid to the inspired.
Depending upon your point of view (internal or external), current management at Microsoft ranges from excellent to incompetent. A closer look reveals a more quantum mechanical view of things though: superimposed states that are both terrible and wonderful. Applying Mr. Heisenberg's lens, we see the greatest wealth creation team in history and the greatest mass destroyers of shareholder value ever.
But Microsoft has always been about extremes. Never content to sit in the comfortable middle, it thrives at the boundary layer, gulping oxygen when it can, but sometimes it just burns.
Recently, from this Softie's viewpoint, It burns us, yes it does.
Senior leadership is without a clue and mostly absent, and this has left the rank-and-file managers to figure it out on their own.
This is a sorry state of affairs.
So, in the interest of trying to help kick-start a moribund leadership culture back into what HR wonks called "engagement", the goal of my blog is to shine that spotlight into the dark nooks and crannies of leadership and management at Microsoft, and find constructive ways to break up the logjam that is a multi-billion dollar impacted management team.
Ground rules: constructive comments only, please. Comments are being moderated. Stay on topic.
Stand by for part one: Whither Microsoft's Management Style?
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