Saturday, May 03, 2008
More on process: Are "teams" the enemy of achievement?
How widespread is this sentiment?
Let me talk about my favorite bête noire: corporate wussiness. From where I sit outside the corporate world, I see changes so profound that I’m glad I don’t have to work in that environment anymore. I don’t think I’d last half an hour.
Do your best to read the whole thing before commenting.
18 Comments:
By 
SR, at
Sat May 03, 09:42:00 AM:
I'm with Dr. Helen on this one. For a long time now I've noticed that the Mayors of all the small towns here in No Cal are women. Men don't think the job is worth anything.
Also, it might be why approval ratings for President Bush, arguably a firm decision making man are so low.
Or it just might be that his decisions on Iraq haven't panned out yet.
By 
, at
Sat May 03, 10:03:00 AM:
I think there's something to the observation although I'm not convinced that this evolution in the corporate world is so terrible. Either way, I'd place the credit / blame on a different mentality. The corporate euphemisms (my favorite: my company doesn't fire people... they get "counseled out") and such seem to be driven by the need of many to be constantly told how great they are.
We just had a management team meeting in my office where the presenter hit on the idea, oft stated, that "today's generation" has grown up accustomed to being showered with praise and needs regular validation so we managers need to be always cognizant of this and make sure that our teams feel appreciated. (Full disclosure: I'm 27, so I'm not exactly sure when I parted ways with "today's generation.")
I think this can be traced back to the self esteem movements within education and its many variants. In short, it seems that the "feminization" of the workplace is a major symptom of the "feminization" of boys through their formative educational years - about which much has already been written.
By , at
Sat May 03, 10:25:00 AM:
Wow, perhaps there is hope for western civilization. After my wife died I spent four years trying to deal with the changes in my life. One of the things I have slowly come to understand is just how much everything has changed since I was young. When my kids joke about me being a dinosaur, they don't know how right they are.
There is something besides feminism that has contributed to the "team" approach and that is the lawsuit industry. How many people, male or female, think it is wise to strike out as a sole proprietor in a high profile business that makes lots of money and has valuable assets, when a lawyer can take it all away? Like sardines we travel in schools to avoid the sharks. Remember when doctors could be in "Private Practice"? In todays world the lawyers lined up to sue Dean Kamen before he even sold his first Segway.
By , at
Sat May 03, 10:43:00 AM:
'Are 'teams'the enemy of achievement? I'd have to agree with that. Teams are sort of an intellectual socialism. If no individual is allowed to fail, then no individual can be allowed to succeed. I believe teams also reinforce the adage that the nail that sticks up gets pounded down.
By D.E. Cloutier, at
Sat May 03, 11:15:00 AM:
"What they do is refuse to play."
Or they spend most of their time at other playgrounds--Shanghai, Bangkok, Singapore, etc.
Tyree: "How many people, male or female, think it is wise to strike out as a sole proprietor in a high profile business that makes lots of money and has valuable assets..."
That's another reason to become a "citizen of the world" with businesses in other nations. It's not hard to become bulletproof. But you have to think globally.
By , at
Sat May 03, 11:31:00 AM:
This reminds me of a Dave Barry quotation:
"Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other large organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot actually masturbate."
I'm also not sure it's because of feminization... but the lack of clearly defined responsibility and authority in the workplace does indeed drive me out of my mind, and unfortunately occurs more often than one would expect for a sole proprietor.
By , at
Sat May 03, 11:43:00 AM:
There are so many examples of outstanding team achievements that I will say the answer to the question is no. Some teams work well and others do not. The ability to craft a good team is a valuable art. So even highly cooperative teams need leaders.
Those leaders might be male or female, but they must have some masculine traits. In my view the dysfunctional trend is not hosannahs for teams, but raspberries for leaders.
Leading does not mean, in my view, walking all over people, but it does mean pacing the music and knowing when to kill the horn section.
By MEANA55, at
Sat May 03, 12:43:00 PM:
I've read the linked post and the comments.
I cannot buy the man vs. woman angle. The clash can certainly be characterized as a struggle between masculine and feminine ideals, but I don't think there is enough linking reality to ideals to say that women in the workplace are the cause.
On the political scene, Woodrow Wilson, the most nancy-boy wuss to occupy the White House until 1977, was elected and re-elected before the 19th Amendment was ratified.
I think that the process plague, including overemphasis on teams, is cargo cultism (magical thinking) on the part of the stupid-industrious. The stupid-industrious admire the smart-industrious while resenting the smart-lazy. The smart-industrious can build process schemes that return benefit by "removing unnecessary sharp objects from the room" and minimizing the risk of relying on individuals' judgment. The stupid-industrious see that, fail to see or wilfully ignore the cleverness that went into it, and think, "look at all the good that comes from hard work!"
But a good process is easily subverted into busywork by switching the measures of productivity from hard standards that depend on externalities and reflect success/failure outcomes (such as number-of-widgets-sold and profit-per-widget-sold) to internally controlled standards for which progress reflects the amount of effort expended (levels of compliance with standard XYZ, achievement of consensus across stakeholders, and the sheer weight of documentation produced).
This subversion is way too tempting for the stupid-industrious because it values and rewards hard work regardless of the big-picture wisdom of performing that work while sticking it to the resented smart-lazy who are allergic to busywork. The smart-lazy leave, get canned, or choose not to play. There simply aren't enough smart-industrious types to take-up the slack when the smart-lazy pull their clarity from the game, and life becomes Dilbert.
By , at
Sat May 03, 12:47:00 PM:
In my company, this has lead to a very interesting phenomenon. We sort of have two divisions of people, there is the normal company (process driven, reports, team meetings, etc) and the group of “leads” that actually create, run, and trouble-shoot the business process. Almost all of the groups in the technical areas have one, they each report to their own manager, and interface with each other when issues cross boundaries, but the pay no attention to the “project” management office or company wide organizations (enterprise architecture group, integration design authority, etc) that are supposedly driving the work. For the most part the “leads” don’t care about formal recognition, and when the work is done, the “front” organizations take the formal credit, and the “leads” continue to make everything function. Pretty much everybody from the COO on down know which individuals these are, they will always get their raises on time, promotions on schedule, max out bonuses, etc. and essentially are isolated from the day-to-day “corporate culture”. The funny thing is that if you look at their “HR” job description and their daily activities, there is nothing even close to matching, because it they did match, then the organizational structure wouldn’t know where to put them.
By MEANA55, at
Sat May 03, 01:08:00 PM:
Anonymous, at Sat May 03, 12:47:00 PM
The situation of super-players that you describe has been the de facto coping-by-circumvention technique I've experienced my entire career in both the public and private sectors.
If your company is publicly traded, then this will soon be a thing of the past. The Sarbanes-Oxley crowd has pretty much strip-mined the financial controls market down to the bedrock, and they are now setting their sights on applying separation-of-concerns controls on IT management. The semi-porous barriers that the super-players regularly cross are rapidly being replaced with go-to-jail Chinese walls by the compliance mavens.
By TigerHawk, at
Sat May 03, 01:14:00 PM:
MEANA55 -
I am the CFO of a public company, and you are absolutely (and sadly) correctly. That is why I do not know a single executive of a public company that does not wish he could work for a private company.
By MEANA55, at
Sat May 03, 02:15:00 PM:
TigerHawk -
First off, sorry to hog comments on your post :-)
RE: Your CFOship in a public company: While, in the words of Hank, Sr., "I'm sorry for you, my friend," I think the future is bright for you and the other execs in your situation who recognize things for what they are.
In my opinion, the utility of incorporation (from an Adam Smith standpoint) has been declining steadily for industries without major capital holdings. Technology has reduced communication costs and transaction friction almost to zero. Just-in-time techniques and free agency are obsoleting the practice of maintaining either widget or talent inventories.
Sarbanes-Oxley is just another nail in the coffin.
I figure that once some financial genius invents a legal way to launder publicly traded securities into investment in privately held companies, it'll be Katy-bar-the-door in the rush to circumvent onerous regulation.
I further think that holders of major capital (equipment, real estate, and intellectual property) will have to transform into leasing companies to survive.
The pin that bursts the bubble of my little fantasy is, "What to do with the armies of displaced officious, petty bureaucrats?" Kuru pretty much rules-out the Soylent Green approach.
By Escort81, at
Sat May 03, 04:19:00 PM:
Kuru, oh, that is nasty. Soylent Green is really one of the late Charlton Heston's underrated movies, though. The mixing in of Beethoven's 6th Symphony in the scene where Edward G. Robinson goes on to meet his maker was well done.
TH, I was aware of your company when it was private, and take my word for it, it's a much better place to work now than it was 15 years ago, and you and your colleagues deserve much of the credit. That is, most of the improvement has to do with executive talent and leadership, but you have to be able to attract that, as your firm has done over the last 10 years (admittedly, much of it pre-SOX).
Under MEANA55's theory, we should see a rush on the part of public companies to go private if the S&P 500 gets knocked down a few hundred points, making such deals cheaper to do. Lord knows there is lots of private equity capital sloshing around out there that would happily finance moderately leveraged go-private transactions in the $1-50 B size range. Could be, might happen. The counterweight to that is the fact that some executives actually become accustomed to option exercises and sales of stock (assuming they are in the money), even at ordinary income tax rates, if that applies. They'd have to go without that for some period of time, which might not be such a bad thing after all.
By Noumenon, at
Sat May 03, 11:55:00 PM:
The possibility that public companies will go private is one reason I don't trust my 401(k) to take care of me when I'm old. That would make the S&P 500 go flat and never recover.
It's interesting how the tone of the commenters affects the perception of the post. Going by the comments here, Kim's post was about corporate management style. Going by the comments there, it was about how women suck.
My company (200 people) is 100% male in management, with women relegated to the HR and QA departments. The managers must not regard positive feedback as their responsibility, so there's no praise for anyone. It kind of sucks.
By randian, at
Sun May 04, 03:01:00 AM:
MEANA55, can you post some pointers to "SARBOX crowd wants to screw up IT too" articles? It doesn't surprise me that this would be true, but I'd like more information.
By Simon Kenton, at
Sun May 04, 10:53:00 AM:
I watched a classic case of this play out. The Powers wanted a data-delivery product for the transportation industry. They created a small division for it and gave it over to a promising young woman. She hired the staff she wanted, and made 15% of their performance criteria how well they contributed to staff relations. (Cooperates well in class.) Thus began the era of good feelings. Division staffers traveled the US trying to determine what the transportation industry wanted in the way of data. And would they like it on CDs, or in a magazine, or in a virtual magazine, or online via a database, or...? They traveled the world investigating 'fuzzy logic on a chip' and search algorithms whose performance 'really ramped up' when they hit the 15000th result for a search. (They never did understand a search with more than 10 results had failed.) For the final week of every month, her entire staff went into overdrive, helping her craft a presentation for the monthly staff meeting. I do have to admit that she gave GREAT powerpoint. She had even mastered the grand strategem, so difficult for many women, of including some PP slides of professional sports.
At the end of two years, the Powers concluded they had a crashed B Ark on their hands and that fire would never be invented; they snuffed the division. We actually lost 2 women over it, the young Queen who was shifted into Strategic Planning, and the Successor Queen Wannabe, who felt she had been with the company long enough and shown enough loyalty that she should have been given the job. Both were very bitter, despite the 2 previous years of glowing staff relations. It would at any time have required not more than 2 months and a commercial database tool we had already licensed to create a saleable product which could have been used to test whether there actually was a market there.
By MEANA55, at
Sun May 04, 12:00:00 PM:
Randian,
First, I made a mistake by saying "Separation-of-Concerns" (software term of art) when I really meant "Separation-of-Duties."
My comment was made from direct experience with a company whose compliance team is interpreting section 404 broadly enough to require onerous controls over every aspect of IT infrastructure.
Here is an article from Computerworld that provides a roadmap for overzealous auditors. Everything in the article is sensible, but that does not mean that a resulting management controls regime will be reasonable.
There is an interesting blog+comments discussion at ITToolbox that contains a good playground-like yes-it-does/no-it-doesn't conversation over the applicability of Sarbanes-Oxley to IT.
The net impact on me is that tasks that should take from minutes to hours take from days to weeks. The people frustrated by the red tape are finding other pastures, and they are being replaced by people who are not frustrated by red tape. The risk is that there are people in the world who delight in red tape, and these kinds of internal controls schemes may as well be job offers embossed on vellum and sent via certified mail to these officious petty martinets.
By , at
Sun May 04, 04:11:00 PM:
No, it's why I quit. Imagine you agreed to a schedule for your work that is very challenging. Your company has "stretch goals" so you're willing to go for it, because it's important the work get in on time.
Now imagine someone suddenly decides *their* part needs you in meetings 30 hours a week. I'm so not kidding. I even had to point out that it was impossible for me to complete my work if someone's going to ask me to be in meetings for 30 hours a week.
Everything was like that. No one holds authority or power, everything has to be agreed on. Because no one wants to take the blame. Or tell people no. Or even express a strongly held opinion.
Finally, the crap hits the fan, and everyone flakes out, and everyone starts ordering everyone else around because all the deadlines are weeks in the past and no one's gotten anything done, and what was hell, is now hell squared.
And the project turns out like crap.
Now I'm a contractor. Those who DO the work, are not expected to show up to most meetings (because you see what you pay them on a regular basis and can easily calculate what you'd waste if they were in meetings).
