Does this remind you of Microsoft?

Hey, it's the end of the fiscal year. People are tuning up their resumes and looking for new gigs inside the company.

Here's a cautionary tale to remind you to always look before you leap.

I thought this was pretty funny until I realized that it hit pretty close to home on the transfer issue.

Hello, my name is...

It's review season, and if you're the type who's kept your head down and worked hard and expect to be rewarded appropriately, it's time to take your head out of the sand. You work for Microsoft, where a good review really isn't about what you did but what your manager and your management chain thinks you did.

So what can you do to change the perception battle and maximize your merit, bonus and stock award?

* Do right by the company by doing good work and being customer-focused.
* Ask your manager how you're doing at least quarterly and what you can do to earn a better rating.
* Get in front of your skip-level and above managers in person, via email or at group events and tell them about the wonderful things you're doing and have done.
* Always tell them your name, your role and your manager's name.
* Cultivate internal business partners that can provide positive feedback for you.
* CYA. Document everything that can impact your review - good and bad. Don't let someone else spin your history for lack of evidence on your part.
* Keep at this through July and mid-August as calibration meeting are occurring. You want name recognition when your name appears on a list that your GM/VP has to sign off on for bonus, merit and stock awards.
* If your manager sucks at vouching for you, make sure you have a good relationship with your skip-level.
* Screwed for this year? Sandbag your commitments for next year and work hard on managing management's perception of you.

Good luck, and don't forget to tick all those boxes in the Performance tool.

Town Hall Transparency

It can be difficult to see things right in front of you if they are transparent or designed to show you some other object.

Case in point, yesterday's Microsoft Town Hall with Chris "Let me buy you breakfast to explain why the market isn't giving us a better P/E ratio" Liddel, Steve "Windows Mobile is on a rocket sled of growth and the iPhone is irrelevant" Ballmer and Lisa "Not earning enough? I guess we're not doing a good job of telling you how much you really earn." Brummel.

Watching those performances make it clear that we still have a long row to hoe before things stop getting worse and start getting better on our leadership front.

Come review time, I wish they were my skip-levels.

Bunnies!

That giant sucking sound you're starting to hear whistling past the door seals on Microsoft campus buildings are the hopes of (hundreds? thousands? tens of thousands?) employees being whisked into the void that is rapidly becoming LisaB's internal "I'm listening, but it's not in my commitments to do anything with what you tell me" blog.

The blog appears to have ground down to four camps. 1) People who will bitch about anything and everything, even when presented with positive information. 2) People who think we have some serious problems and propose serious solutions or proposals to fix things. 3) People who think things are mostly OK, and berate those in group 1 and 2 for their negativity and ungratefulness for how good we really have things and encourage people to vote with their feet if they don't like it. (Hi, Mini!). 4) The lurking group that is beginning to tune out as it appears the blog, which began with such great hopes, is a HR ploy to create the illusion that something is being done.

I was neutral on Lisa until her blog launched and it nudged my opinion of her up to positive. Six months on now and the needle has swung to negative based on her condescending comments.

Now, more than ever, it's clear that our executive leadership is completely disconnected from the reality that is working life for the lunch box crowd and that it is past time for change.

Let them eat bunnies, indeed.

Elbow Room

Overcrowding brings on all sorts of socio- and physiological problems. Depression, stress, aggression, increased risk of infectious disease, etc.

Sounds a bit like the cafeterias and bathrooms on campus, no?

It is with mixed emotions that Microsoft's chronic lack of office space issue surfaced again today.

Reading MSW's hard-hitting interview with Chris Owens makes it clear that we've turned the corner and that the future will be so bright in my future office, I'll have to wear shades. Then you read stuff like this and wonder if it will be worthwhile to hang around to luxuriate in all that space.

While it will be nice to ease the overcrowding, how about also thinning out the management ranks to create even more space? Perhaps we could start with clearing out the ones that caused the problem in the first place by authorizing the hiring binge and then not doing the simple math (more hires = need for more space)?

If something so basic as space planning has gotten so fudged up over the past few years, what does that say about other issues and endeavors?

Me? I'm heading down to my local elbow room to ponder who or what team will be the one cut the Gordian Knot that is Microsoft.

Spring Thoughts

Hey, how'd that Daylight Savings time shift work on your Outlook calendar? I pity building receptionists trying to sort out who booked which conference room first in the system before everything shifted an hour. Myself, I've only lost a few hours of standing around in meeting rooms stating, "I've had this conference room booked for months for my standing meeting." Not that the meetings themselves were all that productive when presenters read their slides instead of talking to those assembled.

Is it time for a dictator? At least dictators can get the trains to run on time.

For those "translucent-skinned" (inside MS blog joke) people who work 18 hours a day, get outside now and take a look at the cherry trees blooming. It may be the last beauty you see for a while as our Average Powers Leader starts moving the chess pieces around for FY08 planning.

Machiavelli is alive and well - it's like working on a thesis. You know you'll feel great when you're done, but it's bloody hard to get to some times when a gin and tonic is calling.

Spring weather also more people heading into the hills in the Pacific Northwest. Number two on the ten essential list is a compass. Was it just me, or was the Career Compass our HR overlords gave to us permanently affixed to point to Pain in the Ass? No wonder so many are heading to the hills.

This Just In...

For the record - Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is not responsible for the February 27, 2007 Microsoft stock price drop.

What if...

Jeebus.

I wanted to take some time off from the blog after a horrific winter storm that blew me off my axis a bit and a work environment that was starting to make slave labor sound like a better career option because I felt I was getting a bit too bitter and a bit too off-focus.

Time off was unfortunately spent watching some drivel telly show with Sir Lloyd-Webber and listening to depressing webcasts from Wall Street.

And I was thus sharply reminded why I started this bloody blog in the first place.

Microsoft's management sucks and blows.

Mr. Ballmer's most recent performance has had him pilloried in the public echo chamber because of the net result of his twaddlings, but if we keep the eye on the ball closely, we see that the stock drop is symptomatic, not systemic. Symptomatic of leadership and management's inability to capitalize on the labors and thoughts of tens of thousands of smart employees and billions of dollars of capital.

The regular town criers all have the same thing to say: it's time for Mr. Ballmer to exit.

Since everyone always talks about the weather but doesn't do anything about it, here's my butterfly wing flap: three people who could be Microsoft's next CEO. All battle-scarred turnaround executives, each brings something to the table.

A.G. Lafley of Procter & Gamble. Look at the quote that is attributed to this guy and what he's been able to effect with a multi-brand company. Just say "Microsoft", "brand" and "customers" in the same sentence to somebody and see how far their eyes roll up into their head. This is the guy to untangle Live and focus the factory back towards software that people want to use.

Anne Mulcahy of Xerox. She's a lifer there, but understands the engineering culture and can obviously hold her own with the misogynistic sub-culture that high-tech can sometimes breed like staph in a Pioneer Square toilet. Her keywords are "communication" and "listening". What if Microsoft had a CEO that not only listened to the employees but also knew how to act with that information?

Steven Reinemund of PepsiCo. At first blush, this comes across as a bit of a John Scully-like choice until you drill down a bit. (Though the synchronicity of this choice might presage Bill G. coming back to Microsoft...) Again, we have a global brands person who has kept a sharp eye on the bottom line.

Taking over the top job at Microsoft would be daunting. It is still profitable, still has a huge market share and still has growth momentum. It's not your ordinary turnaround gig. Might it be that the board has secret thoughts of dumping the current team, but just can't put their finger on anyone that could step up? Are we in a devil you know vs. the devil you don't situation?

Is there anyone else you think might be up to the task?

And in the "Since nobody asked" vein, couldn't you see Lafley as CEO of Platform, Products and Services, Mulcahy as CEO of Business, and Reinemund as CEO of Entertainment and Devices, all spun out as separate operating companies?

A serf can dream.

Stale Bread

Amidst wind and snowstorms,
lurches and launches,
leaders and losers,
I caught myself at times
thinking of the blog.

"I must!",
I thought, but did not.

"Now that's worthy."
I hear, but did not.

So it is time
to rest, to
read some books,
think some thoughts
before scribing yet again.

Bending to the will
is fire
yet the brand
of regret burns hotter.

Anon some morn
will be found
those thoughts
thunk,
writ in their
perpetual
orbits, echoing
across the hazy sea.

=+=+=+=
Collision Domain

Growth: Cure-all or Camouflage?

In some business circles, it is believed that sales growth can cure all operational or organizational ills.

With more money, (the thinking goes,) organizational gaps can be plugged, capital equipment needs can be addressed and the overall company attitude increases, which can lead to a productivity uptick since labor feels it may also benefit from the extra cash flow. This fallacy persists even despite many examples to the contrary.

Even a cursory perusal of business news from 2000-2001 will provide ample evidence of firms that had huge sales, but anemic or negative profit growth.

So, what does Microsoft's track record look like in this area?

Year over year profit growth, derived from the percentage of net income to total revenue, looked like this for the past eight years:

1999: 10%
2000: 2%
2001: -12%
2002: -10%
2003: 5%
2004: -1%
2005: 9%
2006: -2%

(Microsoft's fiscal year runs from July 1 - June 30. Data derived from Microsoft annual reports.)

By my calculations, and I'm no Investment Banker, this is a cumulative profit growth rate of -1.33% for the 1999-2006 period. Pulling in the time horizon a bit, from 2003-2006 it looks much better, producing an overall 11.4% growth rate.

How about the competition? Apple: 14.49% profit growth from 2003-2005. Google: 49.92% from 2003-2005. Yahoo!: 92.61% from 2003-2005. (Hopefully some kind soul will set me straight if I've bungled the math here.)

Is is any wonder why there is such emphasis on controlling spending and hitting budget targets at Microsoft today? Profit growth has been lagging our competitors, competition is more vigorous and our stock is underperforming the market.

The double-speak from leadership and management is starting to come into focus for me.

The stakes on our long-term big bets get higher every quarter, because we're doubling down on each one of these bets in the hope of scoring a pot. And our competitors are calling our bluffs because they've learned our tells after years of taking earlier pots from them.

What I and my colleagues are left to wonder is why we keep getting mixed messages on competition. We keep hearing how strong it is, but the ramifications of losing to them is never articulated. Only vague statements of lost potential future revenue.

Good leadership tells followers what the real hazards are. It fosters trust among the rank-and-file and forces those who are about to endure hardship to focus on avoiding the hazards or at least mitigate them as much as possible. Our growth is starting to look like camouflage for future ills.

Because the vibe in the trenches right now is that we're all about to land on the beaches of Gallopoli in the next few years, and our leaders are not courageous enough to tell us so.

Waiting for Godot, Guffman or Gratification?

Vista, Office, Exchange, Zune - Steve Ballmer was right. His pipeline is finally disgorging product.

Those of us ricocheting off the walls at work due to post-RTM deck chair shuffling are now holding our breath, waiting.

Waiting to see where leadership will lead us next.

Will 2007 be the year where Microsoft truly unshackles from the past and embraces Live up, down and sideways across the entire organization or will it be more of the same ossified structures and processes?

No matter where we go from here, 2006 will likely be the year that Microsoft historians point to as the last where the company's main efforts went to developing and delivering large, monolithic applications.

In this reflected by what our leaders are saying? Let's do the roundup:

Ballmer: "The next frontier for us is to embrace a new business model. And if we embrace it well and that business model is subscription and advertising, where we will be a market leader. If we do not embrace it well there will be issues."

Gates: "Now, at first they're kind of daunted by the realization of what a bubble they've been living in, but then once they get used to that they think, well, we can make it better." (Referring to Western cultural isolation from non-industrialized national health issues; it's strangely apropos for Microsoft though.)

Ozzie: ""It's our aspiration to create seamless Web, desktop and mobile experiences for all activities relevant to users and customers in all our markets."

Mundie: "[A]lmost every product Microsoft has sold has a service component associated with it."

Johnson: "At the foundation is how we weave that together in an operating system that delivers something for everyone."

Raikes: "It's rewarding to be able to send this release [Office] off to our customers and help them take the next big leap forward in productivity."

Liddell: "VFI will help connect those interested in promoting a positive technology agenda directly with policymakers who determine technology policy."

Turner: "When the customer wants a choice, we can provide that choice. I want them to know they made an investment in innovation. That's how we are aligning the company."

Alrighty then. Are any of you ready to crank out a memo about how we're going to do all that? Or at the very least, bop my management chain on their respective heads to get with the program?

Update: Fixed typo.

Delegated to the Dustbin of History

November 7th is the anniversary of the Russian Revolution, and there's no better day to pay homage to Trotsky and take a close look at the Mensheviks of Microsoft management and leadership.

Never fear, this isn't a Marxian analysis of Microsoft's management cadres, (even though it would be a hoot!), but an examination of a key management and leadership skill: delegation.

Walk into any rapidly expanding, successful startup company and ask the employees there if they are doing work outside of the scope of what they were originally hired to do and if they have taken on more authority to do their jobs as they see fit. More likely than not, most if not all will say yes.

Now try this experiment at Microsoft. You'll find that while most if not all employees are doing work outside of their original scope, their authority to change process or tackle issues outside of their sphere of influence is close to zilch.

How can it be that the most successful startup in history, which has a deeply entrenched corporate culture of entrepreneurism, limits the employees in the trenches to empower real change?

Simply put, its past hyper-growth reacted with a corporate desire to expand business lines, resulting in umpteen layers of management accreting. Concurrently, job scope for individuals and management alike narrowed while workload increased, and performance began to be measured against those narrowed scopes. This twin thrust has continued and even accelerated, resulting in thousands (tens of thousands?) of positions at Microsoft that have become corporate cogs in the machine.

Ironically, there is much talk in the halls about empowerment, doing the right thing, driver culture, etc. but precious few managers actually reward employee initiative that requires the employee to take on more authority. The root cause is that the current performance review system does not foster or reward delegation to achieve individual, group or corporate success.

In fact, delegation of authority tends to be anathema to management at Microsoft. Why? It is because of two reasons. Firstly, there are too bloody many micro-managers who are too paranoid to relinquish some control. Secondly, and more perniciously, it is too risky to delegate authority down because if employees screw up, it impacts manager's commitment achievements for review and bonus.

Let's look at micro-managers first. From my chair and on a daily basis I work with the direct reports of three micro-managers that span different groups. I can count on the fact that when I work with these direct reports, decisions that ordinarily could be made on the fly need to be cross-checked with their managers. Non-critical changes to projects trigger management review cycles. The icing on the cake is when those micro-managers complain to my manager that I'm not doing what they asked me to do because when I don't or won't jump through their hoops.

Because micro-managers don't/won't/can't delegate to their reports, it lowers our organizational agility, slows down development and selects for employees over the long haul that function best when told what to do all the time. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to ponder the ramifications of natural employee selection working under micro-managers over a ten-year period.

In the second case, even good managers sense the risk in delegating too much to their reports. The new performance review tool goes so far as to tacitly codify this risk by the aligned manager commitment feature. It's been made crystal-clear to me and everyone in my organization that achievement of these aligned commitments will play heavily in next year's review cycle. The not so subtle message - "Don't screw this up, or we'll all get screwed."

Looking at this from a manager's perspective, there is a negative incentive to delegate anything of consequence to direct reports because if they drop the ball, it will directly impact the manager's review and bonus; maybe even everyone on their team. So much for stretching their experience. So much for widening their scope of authority. So much for my manager's manager giving my manager more authority to share around. it also means that everyone up and down the management chain becomes reluctant to delegate things off of their plates when they're overloaded.

Hello burnout.

There is a way out of this mess and the performance tool can even be leveraged to help lead the way.

Change the review system. Again.

Mini-Microsoft led the charge to scrap the forced curve review system and it bore fruit. Here's one feature request for the Microsoft v2.0 Performance Review harvest: reward successful delegation.

Tweak the performance tool to highlight and allow individual items within a manager's commitment to be delegated to a report by forking off a sub-item or assigning the whole item. Allow the receiver of a delegated item to further delegate it or fork it into multiple sub-items that could be delegated separately. There should be no limit to how many levels down an item could be delegated or forked into separate sub-items. Each delegated item or sub-item should be weighted based upon the overall contribution to the original parent commitment that it/they derived from.

Successfully achieved delegated tasks reward the delegator based upon the % of items or sub-items achieved by delegated reports with a bonus multiplier based on how many levels down the items or sub-items were delegated. Successfully achieved delegated tasks reward the delegate based upon the % of the item or sub-item assigned to them and a bonus multiplier if delegated farther down the chain.

This achieves several goals all at once. It encourages and rewards managers to push more authority down the management chain by delegating. By forking the items, the risk is spread across teams and encourages those who over-commit to delegate further. It encourages and rewards employees by empowering them with the authority to complete items as they see fit and exposing them to projects that they might not otherwise encounter. Micro-managers that don't delegate can't maximize their merit and bonus.

As an example, one commitment a GM might have is to develop a consumer electronic device that plays video. They fork the item off into research, marketing and production sub-items, each weighted at 33% overall and delegate each sub-item to different Directors. The Director receiving the production sub-item passes it down the chain and forks it into procurement, manufacturing and design sub-items each weighted at 11% overall but 33% each at their level.

Let's say that the device gets launched but there was a glitch in procurement, but overall it was a success. For that one commitment, the overall completion rate was 89% (100% minus the 11% procurement sub-item) with a multiplier of 1.2. (Two levels of delegation.) This results in an adjusted completion rate of 106.8%, (1.2 * .89).

Following the math on down to the production Director level, their multiplier is 1.1, but they had a completion rate of 66% for an adjusted completion rate of 72.6%.

I'll leave it to you, dear readers, to suggest how HR should use the adjusted completion rates to award merit and bonus.

A final thought before I wrap this overly long post up. Even if the review system isn't tweaked to encourage delegation, all Microsoft managers should take mandatory delegation training. Managers that don't know how to delegate should not be managers.

My fifth request of Microsoft management and leadership is to send all managers to delegation training and adjust the performance review system to encourage delegation.

Briefly - InsideMS Blog

Both thumbs up to LisaB for getting the InsideMS blog rolling last week.

Now that's a leadership decision I can get behind: real risk-taking along with unleashing and un-muzzling the staff to let us all use our 'big brains' to help solve what ills us. If only the rest of our leadership seemed willing to listen to the messengers instead of run them through with a pike.

One thing that surprised me when I read through the comments on the blog was the number of people of longer tenure commenting and their sharing of future career plans. Very interesting! Does this mean opportunities are coming our way to move the logjam or are we staring at opportunities lost?

In the compare and contrast department, copy just the comments from say, Mini-Microsoft, into a plain text document and line them up next to a plain text list of comments from InsideMS. Can you spot the differences? Trolls? Similarities?

(I know that I'll be giving "colleague" hires spelling tests from here on out.)

Letting Go

By Jove, you take a few weeks off to get some head space from the company meeting, attend to personal and career issues and the world just keeps on a-turning!

From MSFT's one year rate of return of almost 20%(!!!) to Vista invading Europe to Zune's increasing street-cred and momentum!

The pipeline is filling and everything, and I mean everything is going so great at Microsoft, there's hardly anything to write about.

Except that I was two hours late to the company meeting because the bus I was on was doing the milk run, my ass froze to my chair, I got stepped on when trying to wade into the feeding frenzy that was the lunch line and the lines to the bathroom were so insane I almost peed my pants waiting because of all the coffee I had to drink just to keep warm.

Don't even get my started about the 'Product Fair'. The crush of frenzied people lunging for cheap, plastic crap made a Who concert seem sedate by comparison. By the time it mellowed out a bit enough for me to try and take in all the wonderful goodness we're working on and about to ship by talking to people at the booths, there were the constant interruptions of, "Do you have any more Frisbees?", "Do you have any more t-shirts?", "Do you have any more badge clips?", which made me grab a glass of wine and look for some food.

Bad idea.

The only "food" that wasn't deep-fried, (hello, wellness?) was a few token veggies sitting next to coagulated Ranch dressing and cookies. Don't get me wrong, I love cookies, but wine + carrots + cookies = feeling ill on the bus. (At least it wasn't taquitos + chicken strips + wine + cookies = mess on the bus.)

Now that I have that off my chest...

On to: The Microsoft Company Meeting.

This was the first company meeting I've attended. It was likely my last.

Why? (Besides getting frostbite on my butt?) Because it was like attending a Jim Rose Circus show without the entertainment, music and booze. I was pretty much left with a gaping mouth and a disgusted feeling. Oh sure, I was one of the poor schulbs making noise every time my team was mentioned, but rest assured, it was because I was sitting in the same row as my GM and I certainly wasn't going to be one to commit career suicide in front of the rabid masses.

I did, however, find one point of entertainment and one point of real interest in the show.

The entertainment was that for all the noise about search, all the noise about advertising, all the noise about online services, all the noise about games and all the noise about beating back Google, Linux and Sony, the ghost of the past was still in the room. Google is still coming, coming, coming, coming and coming. Linux is still coming and coming and coming.

The entertainment was counting how many references were made to competitors by name during the company meeting and measuring that against the real threat to revenue streams. You can even play along at work or wfh by loading up the on-demand version of the company meeting.

You might expect that the top three would come out something like Google, Linux and Sony. Bzzzzt! Guess again.

(Here's a hint: it rhymes with Snapple.)

For all of the competitive threats online, (go re-read Ozzie's '05 memo and Gates' '95 memos for a quick refresher,) all of the competitive threats in the enterprise posed by Linux, IBM and SAP, and all the threats that Sony and Nintendo pose in games, Apple is the competitive ghost that still drives senior leadership.

What else can explain why Apple was mentioned more times than another other competitor at the company meeting and that it has never been clearly linked as a competitive threat in the online services arena other than as a purveyor of music and movies to the rank-and-file? So what gives? If Apple is a threat on par with Google and Linux, tell us so we can all update our commitments to fend of that threat as well.

Otherwise. It. Is. Time. To. Let. Go. Of. The. Corporate. Insecurity. We. Exhibit. About. Apple.

There, I've said it. Seriously people, it's time to move on.

Which brings me to the interesting part of the company meeting.

Ray Ozzie will help in saving all of our asses if we let him.

I had a hard time hearing him, as most of my co-workers attention drifted off and started chatting during his speech, but what I did hear gave me hope that the Microsoft that I really wanted to join might just be the one he helps to bring about. If you missed what he had to say, go listen to it. Twice.

Ray is not stuck in the past, fighting the last fight. He's firmly looking to the future what needs to be done to get us there and be a solid, respected competitor. And he might just help us realize that the future looks a lot more like this instead of this.

Next Up: Delegated to the Dustbin of History

wfh - The Lazy M

Seattle has a long history of being a company town and being swept along with the boom/bust economic cycles that they bring. From timber and railroads to airplanes and software, the local culture here is as steeped in "workin' for the man" as any rust-belt city.

In a previous boom cycle, Boeing, then the dominant employer in the Puget Sound region, came to be known as the Lazy B. With a bloated work force and almost nonexistent competition to spur product innovation due to a near-monopoly, cadres of employees performed micro-cog roles at a pace only a Zen master could perceive. Getting on the payroll meant solid benefits, wages, job security and the bragging rights of working for a true engineering company. With a sclerotic corporate culture where risk was rewarded with scorn and fear, it became easier for employees to while away the hours and take for granted how good they had it.

There was more fat on Boeing's payroll than a deep-fried Twinkie.

Is this starting to sound familiar?

But just like political scare-mongering before an election, the bust came, and it was ugly for the employees and the region. And the shareholders took a bath.

You might think that an engineering company like Boeing would have documented how they got themselves into that pickle and instituted policies and procedures to flatten out the amplitude of the boom/bust cycle. You also might expect that leadership would have made these changes a core part of a revitalized culture. Sadly, you'd be mistaken.

Which brings us around to Microsoft, another eningeering-focused, monopolistic Puget Sound employer with a burgeoning work force and a culture that feels broken along with a leadership team that seems incapable of fixing it.

It is with some trepidation that I raise a concrete example of management's inability to keep people accountable and productive, and in my estimation, drives a non-trivial amount EPS down each quarter. It is, dear readers, all the emails that begin with: wfh.

wfh, for those not on the inside, stands for working from home, and it is the biggest fiction that exists at Microsoft today.

I myself have used wfh from time to time to get all sorts of things done. I've worked from home to get my car fixed. I've worked from home to attend to family matters. I've worked from home to work on a crunch project without interruptions. I've worked from home to go and exercise. I've worked from home to go shopping. I've worked from home to take care of my pets. I've worked from home to finish that novel I was up until 3am reading the night before. And I've worked from home just to goof off.

I also know that I'm not the only one. I know people who wfh or schedule four-hour meetings to go and work out, shop, go tanning, or work on a pet project. It is endemic. It crosses all levels, from individual contributor to management. And there is no accountability around it.

No one is ever chastised for wfh, because it would jeopardize the manager's own wfh privileges.

The fact that management and leadership lets corporate productivity ooze away with wfh is scandalous. There are no formal rules about telecommuting, there are no check-ins with management about work completed (which is a whole other topic unto itself) when wfh and the fact that the correlation between wfh and nice weather is so obvious, only a bribed customs agent could miss it.

What other company in the world can afford to have such a portion of its work force unaccountable for its time? Only a company with operating margins above 40%.

As much as I hate to shine the light on the nondisclosed perk of wfh and I'd hate to see it go away entirely, I'd rather have more butts in chairs doing work instead of laundry at home. Cracking down on this might also have the pleasant side effects of exposing sandbaggers and being the nudge certain members of the idle vested class need to move on.

There is no way to say how much wfh has slowed us down as an organization or link wfh to product delays. I do know that from my chair, the constant flow of wfh into my inbox makes me question how hard I really need to be working some days.

My fourth request of management and leadership is to find the will to tackle this issue and improve our productivity before the last person leaving Microsoft is asked to turn out the lights.

Windfall

I've been working on a post about the Lazy M, but summer weather, family obligations and my recent review have all conspired to slow down my production on that piece. (It's not like I'm be measured on my performance anyway, which leads me to...)

There's been a lot of heat and precious little light in the MSFT blogosphere about the recent reviews. In my own case, the merit and bonus I received will allow me to turn the heat up a little bit more this winter but not fly to warmer clines where I might be able to actually see the sun.

Oh well. There's always next year.

I don't begrudge the merit and bonus I received. On the contrary, I'm happy to be employed after the dark days after the dot-com implosion, so it's all upside to me. What I did find grating was the messaging my manager had to wrap my review and compensation in.

It was belittling and demeaning, and while both my manager and I knew that the party line had to be towed, presenting what I did receive as something that I should be happy about stuck in my throat. (A raise lower than the rate of inflation is not something that makes me all grins.) After noises about there being no curve this year for performance scores, I listened to a song and dance about how there's only a fixed pool for merit and bonus.

Microsoft makes a lot of internal noise about how it only hires smart people and this smart person analyzed the data presented to me, and by gum, I spotted a curve. Are the dumb ones the ones who are happy about the new situation?

Here's a thought: to weed out the deadwood and cap the avarice, leadership announces a two-year wage and bonus freeze from the CEO on down, but ties a bonus at the end of that period to the share price. Above $30/share, 5% bonus. Above $40/share, 10% bonus. Above $50/share, 20% bonus. All the way up to $80/share, 50% bonus. Those joining Microsoft during the period are pro-rated all the way up to six months before the end of the period. (Instead of spending the last six months on hiring and other HR process bullshit, we can all focus on execution.)

The two-year time line is long enough to turn the battleship to get results and shake loose those who aren't in it for the long haul. The bonus could be paid for by a combination of decreasing or eliminating the dividend along with spending some of the gigantic pot of cash we're sitting on.

How about it? Any leaders willing to throw down the gauntlet to demand better performance from everyone along with incenting us to make it happen?

Or will we still see the same leaders lining their pockets for sub-par performance while forcing the rank-and-file into a budget-dictated instead of performance-based bell curve for compensation?

Like Mike Doonsebury's summer daydream, I guess I better get back to that Lazy M post.

Math is Hard

Update

I'm no financial analyst, and it shows. I didn't know when I made my post why there were so few shares purchased and what Microsoft was going to do with the extra dough they had left over after purchasing what shares they could.

MSFTextrememaker has some good follow-up, analysis and links to the recent share repurchase event. In short, people holding Microsoft stock didn't want to sell at $24.75 because they think the stock is going to go higher in the future and the $16.2 billion that wasn't spent on share repurchases has been added to future share buybacks.

For those of us holding Microsoft stock, let's hope that the next share repurchase also happens before the shares go long instead of short.

****************************

Today, Microsoft announced that they were repurchasing only $3.8 billion of the $20 billion worth of shares in the buyback program they announced earlier this month, and that the balance would be added to future buybacks authorized by the board. The corporate spin is a "just the facts" attitude.

This begs the question of: why so few shares?

Chris Liddell, Microsoft CFO, has been quoted as saying, "We create value by buying at prices that we think are very good."

Absent of leadership's explanation, we're left to speculate as to why so few shares were purchased. I'm no financial analyst, but it seems that either leadership thinks the stock is overpriced or they're banking on the shares falling again. If $24.75 isn't very good to repurchase at, what is? $22.00? $20.00? $15.00?

Or has that $16.2 billion that wasn't spent on shares been committed to some other projects?

It appears that I can only dream of a day why my leaders do what they say they are going to do and have the wisdom to pull the plug on foolish endeavors.

(And dare I even say it?)

Leaders like they have at Boeing.

The Lazy B has finally been eclipsed by the Lazy M. (More on this thread next week.)

Committed

Updated: (Fixed embarrassing title typo.)

I don't know about your group of leaders, but mine is still struggling to get their commitments posted. With the waterfall commitment setting process this year, there's a darn good chance that my review will happen before I get to finalize my commitments.

The irony here is that my leaders committed to having their commitments finished three weeks ago so my group could work on theirs.

Good leaders do what they say they are going to do. It's not so much to ask, is it?

I like the new commitment tool. The transparency is a good thing. What seems to be happening though is that it has become deeply politicized, and is being used as a platform for the, "Look at all the stuff I'm going to do this year!" management crowd whose unwritten last commitment is always "Manage up."

The tool does have its plusses. You can see the boundary layer between the strategic and tactical leadership in your org. It makes it easy to spot the self-promoting managers.

But most importantly, we'll all finally get to see what SteveB's commitments are.

If he ever posts them.

Culture Wars

History's first draft, if we bother to go back and examine it, tends to be couched in the terminology of the times, and that terminology also is folded back into the pop culture of its era. Microsoft has not escaped this lensing in the current era.

From the outside, Microsoft might appear to be a corporation with multiple-personality disorder. Those of us on the inside know the truth.

It's just batshit crazy at times.

Organizational cultures reflect their founders first, previous leaders second and current leaders third. Future leaders are either encouraged to incubate culture changes or they struggle to create their own culture because the existing culture is virulently resistant to change.

At Microsoft we are currently amid wrenching cultural change, but like all major changes its manifestations are varied and effects on population groups scattered.

Obvious public skirmishes in these culture wars show up as Dev vs Test vs PM and Old School vs New School over at Mini-Microsoft. Less obviously, it shows up as towels and valet parking.

The real action is on the inside though.

It happens in meetings when questions are asked, and there are no good answers.

"How does software as a service affect what our team should be doing day-to-day?"

It happens when new hires mix with old hires.

"Things used to be easier without all this process." (Old) "All of the old guard fuck up the process by ignoring it." (New)

It happens when past cultural momentum crashes into current reality.

Open warfare in meetings between people who are trying to get work done and those who think that they are by bullying and shouting at people.

In fits and starts, things are changing, yet the next outcome is still unknown. We're trapped inside a Magic 8 Ball being shaken about by leaders looking for a better prognostication. The irony is that the answers exist in the skirmish lines of this war. Every clash, every idea mismatch, every unanswered question is an opportunity for a leader to step forward. Looking up and down the line from this grunt's perspective, there is no Honeycutt in sight yet, and the bodies continue to pile up.

With Bill moving on, we do have a golden opportunity to re-cast the culture. Will our leaders lead us from distraction to distraction and keep us divided or to a unified corporate culture that works together to just get stuff done?

Until the current rough draft of history starts talking about Microsoft as a leader again instead of as a follower, (insert your own Apple/Google/MySpace/Yahoo! news links here,) the battles will rage on.

Financial Analyst Meeting Leadership Insight

The most important thing I learned from the Microsoft Fiancial Analyst (FAM) meeting was that Steve Ballmer has learned some things recently.

In the second paragraph of his FAM keynote, Mr. Ballmer admitted that he met some shareholders and had his eyes opened.

This is a good thing for Microsoft.

Why? Good leadership, once finally exposed to negative or bad news or views, is able to discern griping from real issues. And Lordy, does Microsoft have some shareholder issues. (Raise your hand if you'd own more shares if your options weren't hanging about with Davy Jones.)

But great leaders identify real issues and address them before they become gripes and blossom into large, hairy issues that require a special trip to Wall Street in order to have their eyes opened.