Categories: sumana | Work:Management and Leadership
# (7) 23 Aug 2010, 09:45PM: Two Tips On Convincing Managers & Executives To Invest In Your Technology Projects:
From a years-old job-advice email to a friend. The sort of knowledge that Rachel Chalmers or Karl Fogel finds obvious but that some of us still haven't quite integrated into our day-to-day communications and long-term strategies:
You need to be able to express your suggestions to your boss in terms of financial incentives and losses.
A few things I've picked up during a recent class in "Technology in the Business Environment" (when I was doing the master's in tech management at Columbia):
I) Management focuses on the things that drive the organization (directly making money), and tends to ignore things that support the organization's drivers. If you're directly making money, lowering the cost of producing the product/service, increasing management's control, increasing product quality, increasing the knowledge available to an important decisonmaker, or improving customer service, you can describe your work as a driver. Can you find a way to describe your high-level TODOs in one of those ways?
II) Here's a model of management's priorities for technology investment. The higher up this list you can get, the more attention you can grab from management.
Revenue. Guaranteeing a financial return. Not just cutting costs, but actually MAKING money from customers.
Increasing scarce productivity. If the demand for a product exceeds the supply, then this is attractive. [1 and 2 indicate that the company is growing, and interested in the future. A good sign!]
Cutting costs. More popular in a struggling company.
Competitive advantage -- this means the company is already behind its competitors and has lost first-mover advantage.
Tech for the sake of tech -- pizzazz and leadership.
So can you explain "creating system-monitoring scripts, streamlining processes, and installing and configuring new programs on the server" so that they're way up on that list?
Let's say a system-monitoring script would take your service from 95% uptime to 99.9% uptime. That's #2. Maybe one of the high-level tasks you do will make it possible for your company to serve twenty units instead of fifteen (#2) or even start a whole new line of products (#1). But "It's more elegant/technically correct" is #5.
I welcome comments, tips, examples, disagreement, and cake.
Even at pro-FLOSS businesses, logistical obstacles and incentive problems get in the way of giving back. I’ll show you how to fix that.
My session notes are now available. If you were there, please feel free to clarify them and add your notes or links to your notes elsewhere.
The very short version: a company does not upstream its patches, even though it should for long-term practical reasons, because of problems in four general categories. The company might lack a FLOSS culture. There might be legal confusion about what employees are allowed to do, and how to get permission. The project management workflow and timelines might not allow time for proper engineering. And the external project might have a terrible UI for new contributors.
Once you abstract these categories away from the specific problem of accidentally hoarded code rotting away, you see that they also apply to other problems of the type "I really know I should be doing foo but haven't gotten around to it."
WisCon prep. I'm helping with food for the vid party and I'm speaking on four panels:
Let's Create an Online Business Model That Works. I'm moderating this one: Sat, 10:30-11:45 pm with Jennifer K. Stevenson and an anonymous participant. What makes Facebook games very, very profitable, while online SF/F magazines are usually struggling? If the money from subscribers and from advertisers isn't enough, then where does the money come from? Is the word "magazine" holding some of these ventures back? Let's put our collective knowledge of fandom, web 2.0 and visions of the future together and see if we can't come up with something great.
Must Pleasures Be Guilty?, Sun, 10:00-11:15 am with Vito Excalibur, Lesley Hall, Sumana Harihareswara, John O'Neill, and Sonya Taaffe. Why are we ashamed of the books we love? Critical acclaim recognizes some SF/F as serious literature, works one might recommend to a non-genre reader who thought it was all talking squid and ray-guns in space, to demonstrate what the genre can do. But are these the books you love and reread over and over again, especially when feeling low? And if not, why not? What is the difference between love and admiration? And why is pleasure so often constructed as "guilty" or embarrassing to admit?
Once Upon a Time, Sun, 1:00-2:15 pm with
Vylar Kaftan, Terry Bisson, Richard Chwedyk, Sumana Harihareswara, and Ellen Klages. Pro writers use the card game "Once Upon a Time" to tell half-baked fairy tales for laughs. Find out what happens when four panelists play tug-of-war on a story, trying to bend it towards wildly different endings.
Facebook and Its Discontents, Sun, 4:00-5:15 pm with Cat T. Rambo, Kater Cheek, Sumana Harihareswara, Penny Hill, and Alena McNamara. Have your friends abandoned their blogs and LiveJournals for Facebook? How does writing on our friends' walls differ from commenting on their posts? How do you navigate privacy on a system that forbids anonymity? Is "liking" someone's update the same as commenting "This!"
In the first several months after I joined Collabora in April 2009, I served as lead project manager, got the new website up, and started putting some new project management processes into place, especially in research and development. Then I shifted to personnel management, and created and began implementing a performance assessment system. All the while I gardened the wiki, aggregated and edited weekly internal reports to keep the company on the same page, blogged about our work, and generally gave people the information and the nagging they needed to make informed decisions. (In retrospect, I played facilitator, historian, and journalist a lot, plus mentor to 50+ Collaborans.)
Collabora's a different place than it was ten months ago; I helped move them from a startup to an enterprise footing. Management structures change as needs and capabilities become apparent, so the directors and new hires (including the awesome Martin Barrett) will carry this work forward, and I offer them my best wishes. I'm happy to talk more in detail about what I did at Collabora, especially if you're interested in what I can do for your organization.
In the near future, I'm taking some time to relax and take care of existing obligations before I incur new ones. Then, starting in late February or early March, I'll be volunteering fulltime on some open source/free culture projects for several months. I haven't yet decided which ones, or in what capacity, so feel free to recruit me.
# (1) 25 Sep 2009, 08:49AM: We Already Know The Title Of His Management Tips Book:
I used to watch Project Runway identifying with the contestants. Now I watch and think, "Tim Gunn is really good at phrasing criticism in a way that's likely to get across to the designer. I want to be that kind of manager."
#25 Apr 2009, 11:27PM: Hiro-ics Don't Scale, They Say:
Now I'm rereading Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash bit by bit. Spoiler ahead:
The important thing is, Hiro, that you have to understand the Mafia way. And the Mafia way is that we pursue larger goals under the guise of personal relationships. So, for example, when you were a pizza guy you didn't deliver pizzas fast because you made more money that way, or because it was some kind of a [expletive redacted] policy. You did it because you were carrying out a personal covenant between Uncle Enzo and every customer. This is how we avoid the trap of self-perpetuating ideology. Ideology is a virus. So getting this chick back is more than just getting a chick back. It's the concrete manifestation of an abstract policy goal. And we like concrete -- right, Vic?
pp. 349-350, massmarket paperback
There's a lot going on in this paragraph.
For one thing, the speaker makes the same tripartite distinction that my ex-boss does. How do you get peons in an institution to act in the organization's interest? Financial incentives, military-style unthinking policy compliance, or a relationship that comprises part of the employee's identity. That last one is most interesting. Fog Creek, the Mafia, some religons, really elite military units, Joss Whedon fan clubs, open source, sports cheerleading, political activism and nonprofit work are all activities or groups that go from "something I do" to "something I am."
We say "drink the Kool-Aid," not just because we know loyalty will kill you, but also because the ingestion metaphor sounds right to us. You are what you eat. Mike Daisey has a moment in at least the book version of 21 Dog Years: Doing Time at Amazon.com that touches on that. He writes a letter to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, detailing a dream in which he cuts off Bezos's left hand and runs away with it:
You're all behind me, spilling out of the building like so many ants, but I'm running too fast for anyone to ever catch me. I'm out on the lawn, eating your hand, hungry like I've never been in my life. I eat the whole thing, chew through the bones, and now I own part of you, just like you own the best part of me. I wake up so indescribably proud.
The speaker in Snow Crash, however, doesn't just value loyalty for sentimental reasons. The Mafia rescue Y.T. because she is a friend of Uncle Enzo. If they don't rescue her, then her relationship with Uncle Enzo means nothing, and the value of the personal relationships that structure the Mafia is suspect. That's the policy goal: to maintain the currency that is a friendship with a Mafia executive. Per existing real-life Mafia scholarship, organized crime aims to replace government, to become the main way people and households and businesses relate to each other and get their needs met.
This is why bureaucracy is a good thing: because otherwise it would be personal relationships that decided whether you could or couldn't get a license, or buy that car. No such thing as a sticker price without bureaucracy, incidentally.
But what is an institution that only comprises specific personal relationships, one that eschews ideology? Is it a family? Is it a tribe? Is it LinkedIn? It seems like a rather fragile thing to me, like the structures from "World of Goo," liable to fall over under their own weight, or when people find another social network with better swag. Thus L. Ron Hubbard's apocryphal line that the real money is in starting a religion. Ideology is a virus, sure, but it's also a trellis for the vines to grow up, to comfortably trap them.
Anathem is obviously about an institution (the monastery system) that has thought very hard about how to perpetuate itself over the thousands-of-years long term. But Snow Crash and Diamond Age are about institutions, too, and specifically about the challenges of building and leading multigenerational or world-changing institutions. Enzo, Y.T., Jason "Iron Pumper," the terra-cotta-blazer Mafia kids, and L. Bob Rife could make for a pretty entertaining "Management Secrets of Snow Crash" presentation. Maybe I should write it.
# (7) 01 Apr 2009, 09:17AM: New Awesome Work:
Martin and I are co-founding a new firm to produce the PoTeaTo, a food-and-beverage convergence device targeted at the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. Simply drop the PoTeaTo into a small pot of boiling water and watch the seam split, revealing two pre-blanched potato halves and one strong teabag! Boil them together and you'll have a meal and the drink to go with it.
Just kidding. Actually, starting in a couple of weeks, I'll be working at Collabora, an open source consulting firm. I'll be managing projects and helping them develop awesome tools like the Telepathy framework and the Empathy instant messaging/IRC/VoIP/video chat application. Yes, people are using the phrase "Skype-killer."
I'll get to telecommute (casual day every day!), advance the cause of Free/Libre/Open Source Software, and facilitate the work of dozens of geeky colleagues around the world.
Exciting! The PoTeaTo shall have to wait (in a dry, dark, cool place).
#01 Apr 2009, 12:49AM: Cost-Benefit Analysis For Projects: Caution!:
We often say that something is/isn't "worth it" based on a reflexive guess. The important thing isn't quantifying all those guesses to the tenth decimal point, it's getting into the habit of interrogating them. How certain are you of the benefit & harm you're thinking of causing? Who, specifically, will benefit or hurt? Have you taken into account interest rates/inflation for long-term investments? And what's the opportunity cost? A CBA isn't an answer, just a tool for understanding the financial implications of a decision. But if you're overruling a financial decision with a cultural/ethical/positioning one, you should know you're doing it.
Tonight Stallman pointed out that twenty additional years of copyright monopoly, added onto the existing multi-decade duration, were basically nothing in a discounted-present-value calculation, and thus of zero benefit to a rational actor. Then again, as a repeated step in a "perpetual copyright on the installment plan" scheme...
#28 Mar 2009, 02:33PM: A Book Review About Leadership:
I mostly wrote this book review in the fall of 2008.
On the Psychology of Military Incompetence
by Norman Dixon
1976
On The Psychology of Military Incompetence is 400 pages long, and worth savoring. Its fundamental question: Given that information is the reduction of uncertainty, how do leaders of different temperaments react to information? The author limits himself to cases of British incompetence in battle, but of course you can extrapolate from that.
Dixon clearly but steadily builds his case against the prewar British military. The one-line summary is: culture stagnates into convention, which drives out the unconventionality you need to succeed. More nuances ahead.
From Skeleton to Prison Cell
Dixon shows that to advance in the British armed forces, in peacetime, demanded rule-following and an authoritarian mindset. But the mission of a military is to win wars, and that requires fluidity and a willingness to take risks -- and offend superiors.
So, what happened when peacetime promotions hit a war zone? Disaster -- in the Crimea, in southern Africa, all over Europe in the First World War, over and over again. Soldiers' courage and tenacity get their generals out of the holes they dig.
In general, institutions get the leaders who fit into those institutions and succeed at the unstated goals (for example, avoid retreats at all cost, impress politicians, keep civilians uninformed and complacent). If the unstated goals don't line up with the institution's stated goals, then leaders will tend to do the things they've been rewarded for in the past, especially in moments of high stress and low certainty. Therefore, in battle, bad commanders freeze up, wait for orders, ignore new information to appear "decisive," give panicked and contradictory orders, lie to maintain their personal reputations, and so on. And disaster happens, over and over again.
In Dixon's view, the British military suffered from groupthink and valued particular upper-class traits over merit. It's astonishing that military personnel would need to be told that the map is not the territory, the signifier not the signified, but indeed they cared more about the signs and forms of morale and professionalism (such as clean clothes and polished brass) than about warm clothes, edible food, and working equipment.
Narcotic Assumptions, Lenses & Blinders
I'm in India as I write this and dealing with my own need for shiny appearances. I often forget, once I return to the States, that I find -- for example -- hermetically sealed bathrooms reassuring. My parents live in a home where the plumbing and electrical work aren't consistently hidden beneath stucco and sideboards, and it surprises me how much that bothers me. I haven't seen any marked crosswalks in their city, either; we watch for a lull in the bicycles, mopeds, and rickshaws, then rush over the dusty, rocky street. No accidents yet.
I consciously desire function over form, but that only works if I can convince myself to rely on an ugly-looking system to work.
I calm myself with a fallacious appeal to statistics: if something's wrong, it would have broken already. If other people depend on similarly rickety-looking setups, then they must be dependable. Or I just go straight to infantilism and believe my parents wouldn't put me in danger.
In good times, insecurities and rationalizations like mine are a luxury. In battle and competition, they're delectable poison.
British commanders, similarly, clung to the false clarity of their chain of command, "masculinity," pride, and privileges when they faced the mess of battle. They feared shame more than they minded losing men, and they scorned the "motherly" chores (or retreats) that would ensure troop survival and readiness.
Valiant forays are masculine, but feints and retreating are girly? Again, ideology got in the way of success, as when insecure commanders pooh-poohed nonwhite adversaries, self-improvement, and new technology.
The lesson: Real self-confidence doesn't need ideology as a crutch. The flipside: if you see someone leaning on received assumptions, and repeating them rather loudly, it's because without them he wouldn't know who he was.
Leaderships
The argument above takes up most of the book. In an aside, Dixon suggests that "senior commanders have often to fill a number of incompatible roles": heroic leader, military manager, and technocrat, plus politician, PR man, father figure, and therapist. This is of special interest to me.
I've learned models describing styles of leadership: authoritarian, democratic, and whatnot. These days I'm more interested in the balance among managing up, down, and sideways. Reading these books and thinking aloud about them helps me get perspective. What leg of that tripod have I been shorting?
Works thematically related to On the Psychology of Military Incompetence: Dilbert, the Harvard/NASA case study on the Columbia shuttle disaster, and John Le Carre's The Tailor of Panama.
#27 Mar 2009, 02:46PM: Ada Lovelace Day, Belatedly:
I am abashed and thankful that Rachel and Danny thought to mention me in speaking of women in tech on Ada Lovelace Day. I offer a sidelong glimpse into a short list of my influences Right Now Today:
A woman, my manager at Exodus, a history major or something, whose career path reassured me that CS wasn't the only way into interesting tech jobs. I thank you, Jed, for making a similar point -- QA, tech writing, education, design, sysadmin, and management are damn cool.
Marissa Mayer at Google might be, among other things, Google's Steve Jobs, and inspired me to think more about product design leadership.
Rachel Chalmers, of course.
Mel Chua, who reminds me to learn about how I'm learning, and that my default answer should be "yes, I can do that."
And all my Systers. I thank them for daily popping up in my inbox, being the friendliest forum for questions stupid and subtle, and reminding me that we are legion, diverse, wage slave and entrepreneur bare-metal hacker and CIO and everywhere in between and sideways.
#26 Feb 2009, 01:05AM: Can I Be The Gardener From "Being There"?:
Creating custom software, and perhaps client services in general, are more like agriculture than manufacturing. We aren't stamping out identical units and trying to increase "efficiency" by speeding up the process; we can't, because we can't negotiate away the time it takes to grow. Debugging, or copyediting, is like weeding. Creators and managers aren't forcing a thing to happen; we're guiding the creative spirit, feeding it, and guarding the fruit from harm.
Brooks's Law, pointing out that adding more staffers to a late software project makes it later, has something in common with "Nine women can't have a baby in a month." Add that to No Silver Bullet and you see that the irreducible bottleneck is the complicated thought it takes to make a complicated thing, an artifact of (arguably) the summit of human civilization. Not to sound like Louis CK.
#28 Jan 2009, 06:41PM: Make It No:
Martin, newborn pub brawler, finds that the ST:TNG episode "Tapestry" speaks to him. He calls the theme among these episodes obvious. I'm guessing he saw that they are about leadership/organizational behavior. And thus if I had written Make It So: Leadership Lessons from Star Trek: The Next Generation, those are episodes I'd use as illustration.
I've read Make It So. It's supposedly a series of logs spoken by Picard, but the whole voice is wrong. Captain Jean-Luc Picard doesn't go for bulleted lists. And he wouldn't be so reductive as to choose one virtue (e.g., Focus, Urgency, Intellectual Honesty) to bolt on to his discussion of each episode.
Make it So rightly considers the leadership and career issues in "Tapestry,"
"The First Duty," "Chain of Command," "Lower Decks," and "The Drumhead." However, it also wastes time awkwardly shoehorning management lessons into "Coming of Age," "Darmok," "Encounter at Farpoint," "Peak Performance," "Relics," "Starship Mine," and "The Wounded" when it could be addressing "The Pegasus," "Allegiance," "The Game," "The Masterpiece Society," "I, Borg," "Ensign Ro," "Loud as a Whisper," "Samaritan Snare," "A Matter of Honor," "The Ensigns of Command," "Disaster," "Rightful Heir," "Lessons," and even the Troi subplot of "Thine Own Self." I'm really surprised the talky, ham-handed Picard impersonator didn't take on "Ensign Ro," "The Masterpiece Society," and "Allegiance," since they have more interesting things to say about organizations and management than "Starship Mine," "Relics," and "The Wounded" do.
What are the real leadership lessons of TNG? Other than "watch out for worm creatures taking over your superiors"? A few: You can't do a first-class job with second-class people (cf. every guest star in a uniform); everyone needs to be able to pinch-hit (away teams, "Disaster," "Starship Mine," "The Best of Both Worlds"). Explain your reasons and listen to suggestions when you can, so your colleagues will trust you when you can't ("Chain of Command" and "Allegiance"). The first duty of a Starfleet officer is to the truth. The mission has to take priority over individuals ("Lower Decks," "Darmok," "Lessons," and possibly "The Masterpiece Society" if you look at it from the perspective of the utopians).
# (1) 04 Jan 2009, 05:28PM: What I've Taken, And What I Have To Give:
As of right now, I'm looking for new opportunities in the San Francisco Bay Area, greater Boston, and here in NYC, starting in the next few months. I'm especially interested in tiny startups (let's say fewer than eight employees) or nonprofits starting new projects with tech. I'm starting machinations to ask friends and acquaintances for the names of relevant folks I should meet during my trips to Boston and the Bay this month.
I love writing technical and functional specs, translating among QA, engineers, and businessy/world-facing folks, and recruiting. I'm looking for someplace where I can bring my writing, public speaking, rolodexing, and investigative skills to bear. I want to work with superiors I can learn from, emotionally and intellectually. And I want to help make services/sites/products that delight people - for profit or non.
I'm not a programmer but I can be a good abstraction layer for software projects. I'm looking for someplace where I'll have equity or ownership, or the possibility of rising to those -- a project where I can exert all my talents and pick up real responsibilities.
That's what I'm seeking. I couldn't go after this if I hadn't already found unexpected treasure.
In order to have a sense of playful empowerment, one must be free to change, rewrite, scrap, delete, wreck, rebuild, and tinker with all aspects of the project at any time during its course.
We can play with the inessential things without anxiety if we know they're inessential and our heart feels safe. So what is my heart's desire? To feel useful, really. And this, right now, is how.
# (6) 18 Dec 2008, 07:38AM: Gig-Hunting & Travel:
My luck has turned. Last year around this time, my job search sputtered. Now, I've been consistently impressing possible bosses -- and, more excitingly, possible partners for cofound-y relationships. I have four strong leads in New York City alone.
What's different? I have a master's in tech management, a year of experience with the title Project Manager, a stronger network, and more confidence.
On a macro scale, my timing coincides with a terrible economic slowdown, but that means the competitive field will clear and good labor will be cheap. There will always be money for good ideas, whether from angels or customers. Even in New York City, hit hard by the Wall Street crunch, I'm finding lots of entrepreneurs excited because their nimble operations will be able to undercut lumbering giants.
I find the NYC tech scene surprisingly lively, given that so many presentations and launches one sees are just dumb boil-the-ocean ad crap. Still, innovative work is happening elsewhere in stronger hacking ecosystems. I'd gone on my Portland/Seattle trip assuming that I'd have an easier time finding a startup job there than in New York, but the strength of my connections here are leading me to opportunities that I couldn't have found in one whirlwind week in the Northwest.
More worrisome to me is my week-to-week timing. I'd been meaning to visit Boston and San Francisco in December to grow opportunities there, but jet lag and New York appointments have kept me in New York till the end of this week, and people's availability declines so precipitously in the second half of December that it's not worth it to go before January. Bleh.
Still, now is the time for me to plan big chunks of travel, so I can block out those weeks and plan potential work around them. So I'm going to try to avoid making any commitments here till I can visit San Francisco and Boston in January. Predictions I put down now so I can be embarrassed when I have to correct them: I expect the startup opportunities I discover there will include more revolutionary/elegant technology, more social benefit, and a longer time to profitability.
People who live in the Bay Area and Boston metro area: What are good weeks in January for me to visit you?
#25 Nov 2008, 02:45AM: Some images, tweets, and documentation from Seattle MindCamp 2008:
Please link to other relevant stuff in the comments!
I learned about MindCamp sometime Friday, Nov. 20th, and devised the idea for my talk in about 5 minutes late Friday night while going to sleep and talking with my incredibly patient host, Riana. This was the first talk I proposed and the last session I ended up leading: basic first-year political science concepts, boiled down for use by people who want to understand and change their organizations.
I eventually realized that tickets were sold out, but was determined to go anyway. So I made the 20-minute walk over and threw myself on the mercy of the front desk. Beth Goza gave me her extra registration and refused to let me give any money in return. In hindsight, maybe this is why I was determined to give extra value as a camper.
I filled out a proposal form and put it up. Andru encouraged me to propose as many as I wanted. So I did another for a standup comedy HOWTO, then another to ensure that there would be Powerpoint Karaoke (I was surprised no one else had proposed it yet), and then another to suggest the mini-debate session. I expected that about a hundred proposals would go up and that about half, including 1 or 2 of mine, would get "funded."
Then, during lunch, I discovered that there had been fewer proposals than I'd expected, and that almost all the proposed sessions would be scheduled, so I'd be leading 4 sessions. Eventually, after I swapped a few spots with people, my schedule was:
2pm: Powerpoint Karaoke
11pm: You, Yes You, Can Do Standup
8am: Zany Insta-Debates
9am: Three Models of Power: A Political Science Lens On Your Organization
I found out that Powerpoint Karaoke would be in the first session slot [2pm] at 1:55. Much thanks to David Whitlock and other troubleshooters for arranging the projector ASAP. It attracted attention, someapproval, and chickens.
Anthony Stevens's liveblog touches on how awesome Tom Music's self-help parody session "Winners Never Lose" became. Like spontaneous experimental theater, jazz meets sketch comedy.
After more sessions, dinner, and conversing, I went back to Riana's to enjoy her birthday party, but ended up fleeing after it got crowded. And they say I'm an extrovert.
You, Yes You, Can Do Standup Comedy - 11pm, specifically placed outside the regular session schedule by Andru to ensure everyone could come and the time limit wouldn't apply. David and about five other participants did these exercises, inspired by my Dec 2005 posts. I loved helping people develop skills in such a short time, walking in possibly scared of public speaking, walking out with some tools and something to work on.
Ride home, passed out for a few hours, woke up around 7 to hoof it back to the Synapse building for my 8am mini-debates activity. (Riana later noted that my marketing-speak in the proposal included "zany" and "quickly and reliably goes off the rails.") I was surprised that people got more into the serious topics -- censorship of profanity on broadcast TV, Prop 8 -- than the light starter on the color of Pepto-Bismol. I also learned that many participants and viewers wanted scrupulous consistency in the rules, liked having people argue a side they didn't believe in, preferred logic to eloquence, and deducted "points" if a debater did not at least try to refute his opponent's arguments.
My last session: Three Models of Power: A Political Science Lens on Your Organization. Completed the night before, despite the interruptions of the drunk guy who had to get kicked out. (You may notice that the slideshow is very heavy on the photos, which allowed me to leave my speaking parts less polished.) We started late, and only had 30 minutes and 4 participants, but I think people got some ideas out of it. The most resume-friendly talk title, but the session I feel least satisfied with. I intend to rework it for a future conference.
Much thanks to David Whitlock for running the projector at PPT Karaoke and the poli sci session. Iin the middle of all this, got rides from Nikhil & Leif -- thanks. Beth Goza and Andru Edwards let me in and started the show, respectively, so my thanks to them. And thanks to all the campers who encouraged me, participated in my sessions, and put on cool stuff.
# (1) 16 Nov 2008, 12:15PM: Rachel Chalmers, Will This Make You Laugh As It Made Me?:
I had not considered the necessity of gathering ammunition to use against your own children.
# (1) 13 Nov 2008, 11:04PM: Kickoff, With Elaboration Later:
Next week I visit Portland and Seattle, to visit friends and to interview for jobs. I'm interested in startups there and in Boston, the SF Bay Area, and New York City. I want to help make technology that delights people, and right now I care about equity and responsibility more than salary. Do let me know of any relevant opportunities.
Signs can cost a campaign a little less than $1 apiece, so a $100,000 investment would be enough to give Obama a significant presence on Virginia's lawns. -the Washington Post
In South Carolina [primaries], the Obama campaign refused to indulge in the time-honored, if slightly disreputable, practice of dispensing "walking-around money" to activists and preachers in the black community. The Clintons, by contrast, continued to hand out the usual favors and cash. Obama not only won the black vote overwhelmingly, he also won the state of South Carolina by 30 points.
....
"I think we should do it," the Obama aide told a NEWSWEEK reporter. "It's just part of the culture here, and what will it cost? A couple of hundred grand? ... For a lot of people, if they don't get it, they just flat-out won't engage." (The Obama campaign ultimately refused to provide any walking-around money, though as Politico reported, some was provided by local sources.)
In each case we see a tradition of campaigning, one whose results cannot be measured or audited, that involves spending money. And Obama refused to do it, despite warnings and complaints from the traditional recipients of swag. And he won.
In this way the Obama campaign was like Google. The rules: be untraditional, don't do things if they're not provably, auditably productive, and use distributed communications/database tech. The strategy: get tons of unpaid workers to substitute for paid personnel, and reward them with good feelings.
# (2) 26 Oct 2008, 01:54PM: We Are The That Ones We Have Been Waiting For:
Barack Obama's campaign's momentum (or Omentum if you will) causes me as a manager to marvel at the fusion of inspiration and discipline his organization manifests. Hmm, whodathunk a community organizer would know how to organize self-sustaining political communities?! I've touched on this topic briefly, earlier this month, but it deserves close attention.
Another [criticism] she laid charitably to an Alinsky character trait: "One of the primary problems of the Alinsky model is that the removal of Alinsky dramatically alters its composition," she wrote. "Alinsky is a born organizer who is not easily duplicated, but, in addition to his skill, he is a man of exceptional charm."
By the way, here is where she and Obama turn onto different roads:
Her options after graduation were attending law school at Harvard or Yale, traveling to India on a Fulbright scholarship, or taking the job with Alinsky's new training institute...
Imagine if she'd gone to India! She might have turned into Sonia Gandhi!
Obama built on Howard Dean's "50-state strategy," a long-term investment that is paying off right now in national, state, and local races. But more than that, inside the Obama campaign they recursively build leadership. They recruit and train leaders to recruit and train leaders to recruit and train leaders. The revolutionary technology includes software and three-ring binders telling you how to go recursive. It would be a pyramid scheme if the leaders were just going to reap profit and scurry away when the workers weren't looking, which has happened in previous attempts at this model. But if the organization can devise compelling new goals, as compelling as replacing Bush with Obama, then it will be a force to watch even after November 4th. Can it?
The Zack Exley report from inside the campaign details the risks of Obama's infrastructure investment, and what dividends it's paying. "Rather than say we have X leadership roles to fill, we're creating leadership roles for as many leaders as we have. So we have people in charge of whatever they ARE," says Patrick Frank, volunteer-turned-field organizer. (This is the Punch Bowl Czar done right!) I am amused to learn that the rules from the top include "no drama". Does empowering volunteers and staffers help them let off steam, staving off frustration, low morale, and drama in general?
A few months ago, after Obama won the primaries and caucuses he needed to become the nominee, Leonard and I watched a speech he gave to his headquarters staff [partial transcript]. (Leonard, who poured his heart into the Wesley Clark campaign last go-round, said, "So that's the speech you get if you win.") Commenters on the video say, "I wish that was my boss." But Obama doesn't just want to be that kind of leader -- he wants to make you that kind of leader.
Three years ago, the headlines made me want to "become a manager, a good one." I looked at Katrina and said, "For God's sake, we have to do better than that. And I could do better!" I wanted, and still want, to reduce the net amount of mismanagement in the world. We owe ourselves competence. But Obama's campaign has a higher aspiration yet. How will it change its people, and our expectations?
# (1) 11 Oct 2008, 08:55PM: We Make The Subtext - The Text!*:
Last night Hal [happy returns of the day, Hal!] told me a tale of a job-hunting workshop he attended wherein the leader told him, without irony, that he needed to pump more buzzwords into his resume. Yes, she said the word "buzzwords." She specifically recommended "proactive" and "think outside the box."
I cringed, not just because that's horrible, but because I can talk like that without thinking about it. And I'm glad it helps clients and bosses understand me, but I don't want to turn into a duckspeaker. So it's good to examine my shorthand and write it out in longhand once in a while.
One fraught word with several confusing meanings is "political," as in, "There's a lot of politics here" or "this is a very political situation." We hear stories about "political" workplaces where the term is a dis, but these last weeks of the US Presidential election make for a lesson, polished and cut, in why "politics" becomes a dirty word.
People don't use "political" to mean that we have to make decisions to allocate scarce resources. Or rather, if that's true but it's a decision that doesn't get bound up with anyone's allegiance or values, we say it's "strategic." "Political" means "emotional" or "touchy" or "dangerous, not to our goal but to people we'll need to support that goal."
At its worst, "politics" doesn't just mean that people don't like to look bad. It means that people let their obsession with status and chain of command get in the way of getting things done, and will in fact sabotage useful progress (consciously or not). And it limits the discourse to things that won't offend anyone, which -- when the truth is offensive -- means constant lies of omission.
"Politics" means that, instead of discussing disagreements like adults, people either throw tantrums like babies, or whisper and deceive and manipulate and sublimate conflicts like bullying schoolgirls.
"Politics" means that you have to humor and tiptoe around everyone like they're my dad.
"Politics" means that there are important things, things crucial to the success of the nation, that you're not allowed to say.
This means a politician must slow way the hell down every time she sends an email or takes on a task. Because she needs to calibrate herself. How do I phrase this as delicately as possible? Which audience do I select? Since too much information "confuses" some people, how do I minimize the payload of each of my messages? And so on, calibrating, hewing to "appropriate" talking points until they becomes second nature, then first.
I'd like this dance more if I thought it was a cooperative one where everyone got something out of it. As it is I'd prefer frankness. And I think adults in the citizenry, and workplace, generally should prefer that, and they're wusses if they prefer the truckling manipulation that they're calling tact.
Transparency, trust, boldness, and long-term investment and empowerment of non-bosses doesn't sound like politics as usual. In fact, if "politics" equals dysfunction, it doesn't sound like politics at all. But it is. It's politics -- the allocation of scarce resources -- with an entrepreneurial, dynamic mindset, instead of a tired zero-sum blame game.
"Entrepreneur" sounds nice, doesn't it? In a sense, the buzzwords "Business," "businesslike," "enterprise," and "professional" are the opposite of "entrepreneur," and show up in the kinds of arguments that don't acknowledge that they're arguments. The subtext for "businesslike/professional" goes like this:
The business's aim is to make money, so it must maintain profitable, long-term relationships with clients and employees. Ergo, the customers must trust the business to perform its duties competently, so as to continue their patronage and recommend services to others. Customers use certain measures of demeanor and register as proxies for trustworthiness. Thus, the business's employees must meet the customer's expectations, both in demeanor and register.
Which ends up as special "client-facing" codewords, a taboo on salary transparency, and dress codes. Speaking of dress, I'm guessing every feminist has a bone to pick with "feminine" or "modest". By definition anything I do is feminine. "Modest" and "feminine" crossed with "business" (especially "business casual") give me headaches: exactly what fabrics am I allowed to wear, and what about the inch of skin under my collarbone, and are unshaven legs or inch-long buzzcuts going to be a problem? I end up looking like a male engineer from 1950, matching two out of three desired buzzwords.
A larger question: how do you open up the pre-sealed bag of salad greens that is a buzzword and see if anything's rotted? Sometimes, when I make conversation partners stop to unpack our assumptions, we all come away with insights, as in a PSA for the value of diversity. Sometimes I just feel misunderstood or sense that I'm a pain in the ass. My third-rate Socrates impression, otherwise known as passive aggression, runs the risk of annoying friends and lowering my status with every question at work ("I haven't seen any women at that client, so would this outfit count as business casual to them?"). But speaking the subtext gets the frown; of course the reason it's subtext is that it's so tense and possibly unjustifiable. How political.
#04 Oct 2008, 12:30PM: Subjects And Objects In Geek Careers:
I love reading Derek Lowe's In The Pipeline to glimpse the shape of the biochem industry: what's inherently hard, what's common, and what's revolutionary. The grammar is familiar if the nouns aren't. This came through quite clearly in his recent post, "Hard Times: A Manifesto".
The more I think about all the research layoffs that have been going on for the last year or two around the industry, the more I think that we really are seeing a change in the way drug discovery is being done....
Everyone knows - including the people in Shanghai and Hyderabad - that the difficult, high-level research is still not being done there. That'll change, as the human and physical infrastructure improves, but the bulk of the outsourced chemistry is methyl-ethyl-butyl-futile stuff. It's "Hey, make me a library based on this scaffold structure" or "Hey, make me fifty grams of this intermediate"....
So improve your skills. Learn new techniques, especially the ones that are just coming out and haven't percolated down to the crank-it-out shops in the low-wage countries. Stay on top of the latest stuff, take on tough assignments. Keeping your head down in times like these will move you into the crowd that looks like it can be safely let go.
The comment thread includes much sniping at US firms that hire immigrants. According to protectionists, there is some static number of jobs available for research chemists, forever, and the only effects of "allowing" a US-based organization to hire a chemist who was not born in the US are to drive down wages and deprive a native-born US citizen of that job. They also hold that long-term benefits to the industry and country from immigrants are a myth, unnecessary, slight, or past.
I find these sorts of attitudes astonishing, not just because they're angry and incoherent, but because in a software developer they would betray a complete lack of initiative. There is no way to simultaneously hold these views and to conduct one's career with the attitude of an entrepreneur. Analyzing opportunities, targeting positions and markets, networking, and generally taking initiative means viewing situations as dynamic, not static. What's growing? What's dying? How can I ride that wave? And if someone is thinking that way, then naturally she recognizes the likelihood that an immigrant's discovery or shoestring startup will create a new and profitable micro-industry, and that US universities gain tremendous value from being world capitals of science research.
1) Rational drug design is the best way to find good treatments. We should try to target precisely one receptor with one molecule.
2) We need to understand the mechanism of action of a drug in order for it to be successful.
3) Drugs that are safe and effective in humans are likely to also be safe and effective in animal models. (We know that the converse is false, which is why we use rigorous human testing.)
4) The incentives of the FDA and patients are very well aligned.
5) The discovery of new therapeutic regimes using combinations of existing off-patent drugs does not deserve to be rewarded.
#04 Sep 2008, 10:54AM: Join Us [Me]:
Anecdotally, it looks like a hot market for project managers, a.k.a. producers. Behavior, Alexei's firm PlayFirst, and Brendan's firm inDelible are looking.
After our oldest, first female, or first nonwhite president, maybe we'll be ready to elect a president with a deep understanding of human interface design. This "Archident" would make sure the Presidential Daily Briefings clearly highlighted imminent threats and critical information, and would give US residents single-payer healthcare just as an act of user interface mercy. Any post hoc changes to federal websites or the Congressional Record would be recorded in a Subversion-like record management system for ease in search and retrieval, and to discourage Orwellian history erasures. The State of the Union would include Steve Jobs-esque Keynote accompaniment, a far cry from Ross Perot's posterboard charts or the school-project volcano dioramas that grace the floor of the House today.
Also s/he would have a blog. And constantly be redesigning it. With a White House IT team on call 24/7. And I'd probably be the poor PM dealing with the constant random enhancement requests. So maybe we should wait on a PresIAdent.
#03 Aug 2008, 10:33PM: Log:
L. Sprague de Camp's entertaining Lest Darkness Fall moves really fast. This is probably true even if you haven't just read a 900-page Neal Stephenson novel. I nearly mentioned Lest Darkness Fall in my brain candy recommendations to danah boyd, but fear it's not trashy enough.
William Ball's A Sense of Direction is fantastic and as soon as I return it to the library you should check it out. As I suspected, it has a mix of great inside baseball on directing plays (e.g., three pages on how to structure and practice curtain calls so that actors don't get their egos in a twist) and transferable advice on managing creative folk.
We learn in threes. The first step of learning is discovering; the second step of learning is testing; and the third step of learning is pattern-setting.
The actor will learn to relinquish his fear when he sees that the director never causes another actor to be frightened.
...a question from an actor is not a question. A question from an actor is an innocent bid to draw the director's attention to something unresolved. When the actor asks a question, a wise director doesn't answer the question. The answer to the question is not in the director; the answer to the question is in the actor. Answer the question by asking another question. Allow the actor to resolve the difficulty. He already has the best answer in mind before he asks the question.
Always begin rehearsal on time. There are some directors who like to gossip and joke and waste the first ten or twelve minutes. This awakens a sense of sloppiness in the actor and gives him the feeling that the work is not important.
For future reference, I'm also a fan of advice on pp 58-59, 66, 102-104, and 108 of the 1984 edition.
This weekend (among other activities) I went to a fun party, watched a lot of Babylon 5, saw a friend's wife and new baby, read the de Camp, ate Leonard's excellent sour cherry cobbler, walked around a lot, filed a bug or two on Miro, and rented movies to foist on my fellow jurors this last week of grand jury duty. All this and I still spent hours dinking around on the Web. So there, anxieties!
# (2) 04 Jul 2008, 06:39PM: One Peace At A Time:
In school the teachers said, the real world isn't so forgiving, you won't be able to get extensions on your papers, you'll get worse consequences than bad grades if you do a poor job. And indeed, in my working world, the challenges don't end, I have to seek out feedback from my superiors, and I don't get summers off. Yet I find that I experience greater motivation and less procrastination and anxiety at my current job than I did in college. Why?
I remembered those bad old habits when I read some oldblog entries about procrastination and avoidance in Ph.D. dissertation work. I found it reassuring to read those, and to see that I wasn't alone in my master's thesis experiences. My biggest problem was shame-related avoidance as a turbo maximizer on procrastination. And the gimmick that worked best for me: injecting a trusted third party. When I could talk to a friend about my problems, I often found out that I wasn't doing terribly, or at least that in the light of day my situation looked more manageable. When I made a first-draft pact with a friend, I had new motivation to start the project and gain momentum. Otherwise it was just me versus or with The System, possibly embodied in a teacher.
Talking and working with peers helps me set expectations (how original does this solution have to be? what's a reasonable amount of time to spend on this?) and break down big goals into sequences of little tasks. Socially I was a late bloomer, and it seemed to take me the vast majority of my academic life to grok that I work better this way.
I like working with people -- and for people. Aaron Swartz touches on this motivation in the Fog Creek Copilot documentary when he suggests that work is more interesting than institutional education -- why spend your time doing something fake when you could be doing something real? One inherent problem with academic make-work was that nothing except my own grades depended on it. I thought I was unmotivated, I had no idea how much responsibility I could handle, and I refused to consider a career in medicine because I didn't think I could handle being responsible for human lives. In retrospect, that was stupid, because basically all adults have to handle huge responsibilities with babies, money, driving cars, etc. and risk ruining and ending people's lives.
Then I moved up in the working world. Every time I gained real responsibilities, and saw my work serving others, I started working harder, valuing myself more, using my time more wisely, and attacking problems with greater energy. The experience of responsibility, not merely of earning money, nurtured my ambition.
A few weeks ago, Leonard and I ate at the Shake Shack in Madison Square Park, and we happened to talk to a trio of recent high school grads who were behind me in line. I think they were on a road trip, then off to freshman year at college. They asked us for advice, and Leonard said: start a business. Just find some random need that you can fill, part-time from your dorm room. There's a bunch of reasons why that's a good idea. You get pocket money. You get entrepreneurial experience while risk is cheap and your brain's more malleable. But the reason that strikes me hottest right now: you'll get people depending on you. If you find that tremendously motivating, that's a sign.
And if part of independence is disobedience, another, less frequently articulated part is the capacity for responsibility, not just for yourself but for your dependents. (From stuffed animals to computers to pets to clients to children? How will my staircase go?)
In school the teachers sounded like Morpheus from The Matrix: "Welcome to the desert of the real." But what grows in a sandbox?
Happy Independence Day, and Happy Interdependence Day.
#14 Jun 2008, 10:22PM: Brick To The Back Of The Head:
Zack Weinberg once told me that a relative of his had predicted a change in Zack. Zack was about to move to New York City to start at Columbia, and the relative predicted that, after two weeks, it would be as though a brick had hit him in the back of the head, and Zack would start walking faster. Evidently this was accurate.
I went to the retreat last weekend and stayed with Kristen and Aaron and Anne and Ben, and I need to write about that sometime soon. Then I came to work and went from managing 1.5 projects to 3.5. Today I brunched with Evan and Leonard at the soon-to-close Florent, caught up a little on project work, got new library books, went to a members' reception at MoMA, and met Ze Frank.
Maybe next week a brick will hit me in the back of the head and I'll manage all my projects with the tip of a single finger. Today it's all hands on deck.
One point in that discussion: communication of academic concepts to non-academics requires serious empathy. Gotta work on that. In fact, gotta work on my presentation in defense of my master's thesis, which is this Saturday around 11 am.
Yesterday I put on the new suit and visited the client for the first time as their project manager. The cubicles, corridors, and cafeteria sent me back to Silicon Valley during the first boom, specifically my tech writing internships at Exodus. After I got home, when I was changing into sleep attire and folding my business pants over a chair, I remembered folding my dad's gray and navy pants over hangers in Mom & Dad's tiny walk-in closet in Stockton, all those years that he worked at Caltrans on PERT analyses. For once bumping into the past was comforting. This isn't new. My dad did it and I can too.
#16 Apr 2008, 09:20AM: Transfoooooorm!:
I now grok feedback I've been getting from my superiors for weeks. I need to improve my listening skills and help other people feel comfortable in difficult discussions. Time to reread Carnegie!
Like one S. Jobs, Norton went to Reed College. And he spent at least a few months, possibly five years (it's hard for me to tell by Googling) in a Buddhist monastery. He started the company when he was nearly twice the age of today's stereotypical startup founder. I like how roundabout his story is.
You've seen pictures of Norton from his books and from the Norton Utilities box (software that's been in development and use for over twenty years, by the way), where he's wearing glasses and his hair has gone lighter. But check out 42-year-old Norton in 1985, who reminds me of Jim Fisher and Leonard of George Frankly from Mathnet, the serial within Square One TV.
#16 Feb 2008, 09:05PM: Lessons Of The Past Few Weeks:
I work better when I keep my inbox to fewer than ten messages on a daily basis. Everything that's not a to-do task goes into one big archive folder that I can search or sort if I need something. Thanks, Gmail, for giving the world the insight that, in a virtual environment without haptic reminders of size and relevance, search engines beat a zillion hierarchical folders hands-down. And IMAP rocks.
I still need to work on keeping my volume down when I'm excited in a conversation.
The art of the cc:, especially when sending out an email documenting what everyone just agreed to in a conference call.
If you provide a critical service that other people depend on, and you can't quickly get them an explanation describing the service with sample inputs and outputs, I throw up my hands in disgust. Bonus points if you change the service without telling anyone and respond to questions with "nothing's changed!" for a day or more.
I need more office pants. Black pantage is de rigeur for business-y women, it seems.
A bug tracker is orders of magnitude better than Basecamp To-Do lists for organizing software development tasks. A bug tracker is a collective memory, a place to prioritize, a wiki for specs and repro cases and screenshots, and an easy collection of nifty, gameable stats on How Many Bugs We Closed Today to wow the client and your manager. Even if the project manager has to spend time each day translating between the bugtracker and emails with clients and colleagues, it's worth it. I knew this before but I'm newly re-grokking it.
I am good at this job. This job is good for me. I am so grateful and proud.
#16 Feb 2008, 12:55PM: Superiority Dance:
A couple of years ago, I tried to explain to Eric that he had a bad conversational habit. When Person A brings what she thinks is a new item into the conversation, and Person B says "Oh yeah, I already know all about that," Person A feels as though her conversational effort has been rebuffed or she's being called stupid for thinking the item is new or interesting. I used the Gricean maxims, specifically quantity, to explain to Eric why his habit bothered me: he was acting as though I had broken the "be informative" rule.
Patrick Nielsen Hayden is a little more forthright and antagonistic when he sees this habit:
I personally think conversations about the current emergency would be
vastly improved by a general moratorium on the "What, You Just Figured That Out, Where Have You Been?" rhetorical gambit. Indeed, what that
particular routine indicates most clearly is that the speaker is more
interested in striking a pose than in actually forming a useful alliance.
...
"Charles Dodgson": "I must be a more cynical SOB than Patrick --- I'm
not remotely surprised. It's just a fact of human nature that [etc]"
Second, the game of "You're surprised by $ODIOUSBEHAVIOR???" is itself
odious. Hello, person who has, by dint of great effort, worked themselves
around to agreeing with me! Allow me to point out in the most withering
possible terms that I'm more worldly than you, more knowledgeable than
you, more sophisticated than you, and boy howdy, are you ever a chump.
I've indulged in this variety of superiority dance myself. Astonishingly,
it turns out to not be the most effective imaginable way of acquiring and
retaining allies. Human nature is so unpredictable; who could have known?
Last night I saw Eric and a bunch of other folks in my master's cohort at Jen's party. The Swiss guy played the piano and I joked that the hydrazine in that satellite the government's shooting down is just a Xeroxed zine for people who love water -- perfectly harmless! I mentioned how much I love my new job, especially because the people are friendly: more specifically, the founders at the top don't shun human interaction the way Joel and Michael do, and the company culture suits me far better. Sure I'll have moments of conflict with my coworkers, but they'll be about "who's in charge of this task" or "you should have done that more quickly," not a fundamental misapprehension of human nature.
#02 Feb 2008, 06:45PM: Here We Go:
By day two at Behavior I got assigned to a project. Every company advertising a job says that you must be comfortable in a fast-paced environment and this is the first time since Salon I've really felt the truth of that. And Leonard is back! Oh, how I've missed him. Now till May: hectic and full of accomplishment, I predict.
# (8) 28 Jan 2008, 07:35PM: New Job:
I have just accepted a job offer from Behavior Design as a full-time Project Manager. Behavior has done some awesome work, such as the redesign of The Onion, lots of sites for HBO, and interactive kiosks for New York's MoMA. And they're right on my subway line, where Chelsea and the Flatiron District meet Midtown South.
#24 Jan 2008, 04:54AM: Just In Time Idiot?:
Great, a new breed of anxiety dream. In this one I basically get told that my lack of coding chops means I have absolutely no right to make judgments in technology matters.
I woke up just before my haranguer told me what "JIT I" meant, and why the insight of that framework was that I sucked. Can't find anything relevant for that on Google.
#25 Dec 2007, 09:40AM: OMG Squee:
Yesterday I got David Neeleman's autograph. Rock! I was just stretching my legs walking the aisle around hour three of the flight when I saw a familiar-looking man in a yellow sweater talking with kids and flight attendants in the back of the plane. I approached, and it was him! Oh, how fannishly I gushed. A little while later he did the gladhanding walk through the plane.
Neeleman is LDS, and his religious values are part of why JetBlue uses distributed call centers for customer service (think eBlocks). He thought it would be good for families if moms could work from home and earn money while taking care of their homes and kids. Lots of JetBlue customer service personnel are housewives in Salt Lake City and environs.
#16 Dec 2007, 09:40AM: Odd One Out:
Things I've suggested that have not been received well in my classes:
If your boss asks what you think of your counterpart at the company you're about to acquire, and he's as good as or better than you, you have a responsibility to say that instead of subtly undermining the new guy.
Salary transparency within an organization. Everyone knows what everyone else is making. This one got a really vehement "That just isn't DONE!" reaction.
When are accounting principles going to get completely overhauled to recognize the non-fungible importance of people and information? Or at least the fuzziness of the line between cost of goods sold and operating expenses in knowledge industries?
Sumana: Practicing our defense speeches would make them better! So I'm holding a practice session. Other People: Great! Good idea! Sumana: I mean, yeah, no one's presentation will be perfect when we practice, but even if you just have a fraction of a proto-speech, no slides, it's better to try it out in front of people and get feedback early. Fail faster. Rapid prototyping. Agile. Stop procrastinating and get some small useful bit of work done on it right away and start improving! Other people: Absolutely. Glad you're putting it on. Great idea. Sumana: So you're coming, right? Other people: Ehhh, it's not ready yet.
# (1) 11 Dec 2007, 08:12AM: In Which Sumana Suggests That Jumping Off A Cliff Might Prove Beneficial:
I take a quick break from writing about a new technology strategy for TJX to mention something interesting about the job quest.
Given that I really enjoy helping people learn, achieve their goals, and create cool things, and that people do not seem to flee from my approach, and that I have an affinity for software, tech management is a good (and possibly lucrative) path for me. You've heard of the Value(able)s, Talents, Skills Venn diagram? I'm doing what makes sense: starting at the intersection of my talents and what the market values, and using that drive to get better at the domain-specific skillset.
I don't have any experience on my resume that says MANAGER in the title, other than about a year of stage-managing Heather Gold's one-woman show, I Look Like An Egg, But I Identify As A Cookie. But I have a bunch of experience in managing projects and teams. I was an editor on the high school newspaper for three years, after years of being editor-in-chief for other school papers. Quiz Bowl captain. Technical director and sometime producer/adviser for John Morearty's weekly TV show, Talking It Through, rising from camera operator. Creator and teacher of two UC Berkeley courses for three semesters. Not to mention various projects at Salon and Fog Creek.
But getting all this across to someone who only sees a resume (and possibly a short cover letter, if it hasn't been stripped off by the time it crosses her desk) is tough. So I meet people in meatspace and socially network so that my applications have more of a chance on the first reading, and I apply to nonprofits and startups where the big cheeses are more likely to take a chance on a smart, promising twentysomething.
And I'm young and childless and I want a career-building step, not just a job for money, so I'm more able to take those jobs. Or to start a startup with someone, speaking of taking a chance. Let me know if you've been aching to ask me to partner with you. I'm just woozy enough this morning to consider it.
#07 Dec 2007, 03:03AM: Question Time:
The Wednesday night mingling happened after a talk at the Columbia business school. One of the speakers: Martin Sorrell, whom everyone called "Sir Martin" since the Queen knighted him, even though we're in the US where titles of nobility cut no ice. Supposedly it's the polite thing to do, but I wish I'd just called him "Mr. Sorrell" instead of going with the flow and calling him "Sir Martin." He's just a guy who looks like if Harlan Ellison had Christopher Hitchens's face and a broken nose. If Douglas Adams never got a "Sir" then why should this guy?
It was later pointed out to me that he's an incredibly rich guy, one who over 22 years built WPP, the leading advertising firm in the world. But I'd never heard of it or him until the professor who organized the gig started raving about his catch, and gleefully wishing one of us would have the courage to ask Sorrell about his succession plan. I volunteered, since I didn't see what would be so brave about it.
Sorrell didn't mention, but I later heard, that he's divorced and has no children. When I asked the question, he first joked that he had to leave the room, then more seriously noted that the company's succession planning had found internal candidates who would be able to run WPP, externally and internally, as well as he had.
But! Other points of his: No one will run the firm quite as he does, and that's fine. Founding and running businesses are different skillsets and it's rare to find both in one person. He felt the lust for scale, the urge to grow his business to epic heights. Starting a business is the closest a man can come to having a baby.
Hmmm. There is a stereotype that women lavish(ed) ruinous attention on their children because other avenues of self-expression and achievement are/were closed to us. But I hadn't considered the reverse.
#06 Dec 2007, 11:56PM: Sociability:
For three nights in a row I have hobnobbed with people in suits to exchange business cards. I have been telling them that I am seeking a project management role in a small, flat organization where I'll listen to users, translate business needs into technical action plans, and coordinate developers who create sites, services, or products that have a chance of making someone smile.
It can be difficult to translate my set of preferences and peeves into a specific and positive objective. I love conversing, and in conversation one can take a few sentences, gauge a partner's empathy for said peeves and prefs, and clarify them with vivid descriptions. The one-way static text of my resume just isn't as social. The resume's necessary, but I'd rather hobnob, even if it means I have to put my nice shoes on.
#13 Nov 2007, 03:30PM: Medium-Term Plans:
Leonard and I have decided that we'll stay in New York City through the end of 2008. I'm now looking for a tech project management job in Manhattan or environs, so if you have a position or a lead please let me know.
Till now, I've been trying to concentrate on my master's degree and on some personal projects. One of them: learning programming basics, with an emphasis on Python. How am I to manage technologists if I don't have personal experience in at least the bare basics of their craft?
Surprisingly enough, van Rossum's Python tutorial is for people who already know how to program. I looked at a few introductions to programming for non-programmers and saw more than one recommendation (example) of How To Design Programs. It has more exercises than How to Think Like A Computer Scientist, and I already knew the basics of Scheme from my intro-to-intro-to-CS class at Berkeley. But I do want to learn Python, so I've implementing my exercise solutions mostly in Python, using IDLE, with a few stops in DrScheme for the cute GUI bits that make use of DrScheme's teachpacks. Thanks to my husband and to Magnus Lie Hetland, and of course the Python documentarians, for encouragement and reference material.
However, after the intro to data structures part of How To Design Programs, I began to run into more substantial burdens in the dual-language approach. I'm on functions that consume and produce lists now and haven't done much in Python for the last several weeks. So I'll be getting back into that in December. Being able to read and write code in some modern language is, after all, the point of the thing.
When I was at Fog Creek, Joel Spolsky helped me learn how to learn programming. It's not like history, he explained. When you read a how-to text, you have to do all the exercises and then some, playing around till you learn the abstractions by bumping into all their edges. So the abundance of exercises in HTDP is exactly what I needed.
I've also figured out how to focus and program for hours straight: turn off the Internet (I used lovely Unix toolness to How to Design Programs onto my laptop so I can read it anywhere) and sit with a friend who's also trying to focus and program. Michael Rehse and Fureigh have been great partners for this. Also good for general Sumana productivity: specific daily schedules, not just to-do lists, but task lists with time estimates.
With these career plans, I've laid out some tracks in front of me. Now I just need to stoke my engine.
# (2) 05 Nov 2007, 11:22AM: Ask The Hardest Polite Question You Can:
Last week was a tough week for some kings of finance. The heads of Citigroup and Merrill Lynch jumped, or were pushed, out of their jobs. In the months prior there were rumblings at lower levels, including the "resignation" (who knows?) of a financial services executive who had come to speak to our class at Columbia back in the spring.
He gave a good presentation about becoming more than just a tech person, becoming a strategist and a leader. He may have mentioned ambition, how much you have to want that brass ring to do the work that it takes to get it.
I thought hard to find a question for the Q&A. I raised my hand and he called on me.
"How do you measure your own success?"
That's where it took a turn. He didn't talk about money he's made, or jobs he's created, or people he's mentored. He said that he wasn't sure about calling himself a success. He found great fulfillment in the challenges of his work. Once, years back, when his family was settled in a house and in their lives on the East Coast, he'd gotten a job in Detroit, and he'd uprooted his family (including his college-age child) to move them to Michigan. His wife left him.
So, he said, he didn't know whether he'd succeeded or not, how to measure that.
I said: the measure is, would you do it all over again?
Someone said "whoa." The executive thought, and the room was silent, and he said he didn't know.
I've heard classmates reference that exchange, months later. They are grateful to him for his honesty. I wonder what they'll remember me for.
# (2) 05 Oct 2007, 02:05PM: Plans:
Planned for last night: a sprint of sorts, where I'd help a friend spec out and start writing an app he's writing for his job and I'd do a few chapters of How To Design Programs. We did some speccing, I did exercise 4.3.3, and we talked a bunch about careers, money, sex, and relationships. I'm surprised religion and politics didn't make it in there.
It was rejuvenating to do project-manager-y stuff with him and remind myself of why I'm on my path. It's been a tough week with Leonard away at Martha's Vineyard. As he has a concentrated week of working on his dreams, I'm alone in our apartment looking for any dreams I might have had and then buried. Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women's Changing Lives showed up for $2 at a thrift store yesterday so I bought it and it's helping.
# (2) 16 Sep 2007, 04:37PM: Your Passion, Their Power:
Back on June 9th or so, way before Fog Creek and I parted ways, I read a blog entry on how to hire people for startups and posted a comment that doesn't show up there anymore. Marc Andreessen took down comments on his blog because it would take too much time to moderate them (definitely a better alternative than letting them run amok). So I'm reposting it here, slightly edited:
One of the good things about our industry is that there are frequently lots of new jobs being created and so you're almost never pushing someone out onto the street...
And, the implication runs, anyone driven enough can get another job anyway (in their city, with health insurance that starts instantly, even during recessions, etc.).
The drive/curiosity criteria do exclude some smart people. For example, the candidate who's just coming back into the job market from full-time parenting is only now getting up-to-speed on Sarbox, Vista, what have you. And this person might even make his family a priority (taking allotted vacation time and weekends)!
Startups don't like people like that. The drive and curiosity Marc seeks require sacrifice. What gets sacrificed? A job secure enough to support a spouse, or get health care for the kids. The time to volunteer for a charity, or take care of elderly relatives. Ongoing cultural literacy and engagement.
These tips sound like a great way to find Janissaries who will build your company as they build their careers. They've sharpened their ambitions, honing them to a point, shaving away concerns that regular humans might think important. You won't get "well-rounded," but you didn't ask for that. You want workers who will live and breathe the company with you. And you don't actually want people who care more about something else - family, church, dance -- than about their careers.
Marc basically says as much when he says that it doesn't matter to him why people feel driven - guilt, Type A personalities, what have you. What did happy, contented people ever do for corporate America?
In my del.icio.us-ing I said, "Marc Andreessen and Paul Graham believe that startups shouldn't bother hiring people who care about anything but career." Or, perhaps, once you're hiring people who aren't willing to sleep overnight at the office, you're no longer a Real True Startup.
A factory work shift is typically 12 hours, usually with two breaks for meals (subsidized or free), six or seven days per week. Whenever the action lets up--if the assembly line is down for some reason, if a worker has spare time at a meal break--many people place their heads down on the table in front of them and appear to fall asleep instantly. Chinese law says that the standard workweek is 40 hours, so this means a lot of overtime, which is included in the pay rates above. Since their home village may be several days' travel by train and bus, workers from the hinterland usually go back only once a year. They all go at the same time--during the "Spring Festival," or Chinese New Year, when ports and factories effectively close for a week or so and the nation's transport system is choked. "The people here work hard," an American manager in a U.S.-owned plant told me. "They're young. They're quick. There's none of this 'I have to go pick up the kids' nonsense you get in the States."
It gives me pause to know that this person from my country, a manager to whom probably hundreds of workers report, considers obligations to one's family "nonsense."
If you consider your job a means to an end, you can make the appropriate trade-offs. But if you get passionate about your work, especially at a workplace you don't control, then it has power over you, like a lover or a government. "Work hard" is a code phrase that bosses will use, sometimes knowingly, to make your life worse.
Thanks to "foobario"'s Ask Metafilter recommendation, I'm currently reading the Project Gutenberg text of Florence Nightingale's On Nursing and it's tremendous. This post's title comes from it. I thought it would be like Martha Ballard's diary, but instead it has a lot in common with Spolsky or my business-ish textbooks. Nightingale focuses on executive energy, attention, and putting the proper processes into place such that patients (employees) have the resources and quiet they need to get better (do their work). Once you get to a certain administrative level, instead of solving problems ad hoc you have to think strategically.
But it's still fun to solve a good puzzle, or to hear a good problem-solution story.
Now we're living on opposite coasts. I go to Columbia, where Zack did his undergrad. He lives in/near San Diego, where my sister did hers. OK, maybe that's too forced.
Zack criticizedThe Atlantic, at least the 2003-era Atlantic Monthly. I've been subscribing for at least a year since I find it good for long trips, so Zack, I'd be very interested in hearing what it was you found unimpressive. I try not to pay too much attention to Hitchens or Flanagan, but Fallows and Bowden seem solid. Am I wrong?
And it's light enough for good not-class reading, a.k.a. cardio-machine reading. Elliptical, stationary bike -- the machines in the Columbia gym have little perches just big enough for paperbacks or magazines, but there's really no way I can take notes during the experience. Some people have beach novels; I have Colson Whitehead's fun and moving John Henry Days and Atlantics from the past ten months. And once I've finished the mag, I can leave it in the mag-swap slots on the wall under the clock, next to the Columbia Spectators and Entertainment Weekly that people bring in. ("So that's what Chuck's about!")
Speaking of Fallows -- James Fallows, former Microsoft employee, current China correspondent -- he had an interesting article in the July/August issue: "China Makes, the World Takes." I can't glibly agree with the cover headline, "Why China's Rise Is Good For Us." Fallows does what the business folks would call a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) for the economic relationship between China and the US.
Right now, it's the half-automated processes, like snapping a part onto an electric toothbrush, where Chinese manufacturing excels. At the beginning (design, branding) and end (retail and service) of a product cycle, IP-heavy firms based in first-world countries do great. Manufacturing is a cost center; design and retail are revenue centers. It's classic division of labor to offshore the parts of your business where you have no competitive advantage, can't add value for the customer, and can't make profit for yourself.
That's how US businesses are thinking strategically. And Chinese manufacturers, optimized for cheap prototyping and quick turnaround (hmmm), can do quite well partnering with such firms. But the Chinese government is thinking strategically at a higher level of abstraction. How can China become a revenue center? How can China add value? By building or enticing the institutions that grow intelligent, cosmopolitan executives and entrepreneurs. So the government, being in charge, provides that these things will be done. Schools, Microsoft design labs, whatever you could imagine the frickin' communist dictatorship of the PRC coercing or encouraging. China's not content with being China; China wants to be India too.
Preparing my Open Source Bridge talk, The Second Step: HOWTO encourage open source work at for-profits.
