Environmental Assholes

Professor Sutton defines "assholes" in his book "The No Asshole Rule" as people with the following characteristics:

• Humiliate others
• Demean others
• De-motivate/de-energize others

Personally, I am a believer of Theory Y where I assume most people (colleagues) are ambitious, self-motivated, anxious to seek and accept responsibility. However, there are scenarios where good people will turn into nasty way becoming "assholes" temporarily, willingly or unwillingly, and I would call them as "environmental assholes". In such cases, people are unmotivated, unwilling to take responsibility with little ambition (i.e. Theory X).

One of the causes for creating "environmental assholes" is the out of controlled environment (A Chinese idiom from a renowned author, Gu Long (古龍), best describes this: 人在江湖，身不由己). For example, when a organization is full of "death-march" projects (Note), people tend to act irrationally in order to survive.

I used to work in an organization where it had a harmonic working atmosphere with little office politics and most colleagues were hardworking and ambitious. An effective matrix organization structure was adopted to manage IT projects with project teams composed of different functional groups. In theory, other than the conventional technical challenges, there should be little project problems from "human factors".
However, for some reasons, the departments had to manage a lot of large-scale death march projects simultaneously where most of the colleagues believe low project successful rate. Project team-members faced lots of impractical deadlines. Some of the colleagues left to avoid the lousy situation and these worsened the situation with lesser resources for the remaining colleagues. As a result, the original "cooperative & supportive" modes among members turned into "disunited & self-protective" modes. People looked for the ways to survive (to meet their own deadlines) and they ignored about others' needs, even though they were all working for the same projects. Everyone competed for resources, and declined responsibilities. The old days of the harmonic environment was finally turned into a tough, competitive, nasty working environment. Many nice people became nasty jerks of "environmental assholes". It was an unfortunate situation but nobody could manage it.

Note: According to Yourdon, a "death-march" project is project whose "project parameters" exceed the norm by at least 50% such as the compressed schedule, under-resources, reduction in the budget, substantial increase in the scope. In short, a death-march project is project with more than 50% probability of failure.

Eternal Sunshine

When the day I was young, I remembered that sunny day with clear sky in daily basis was the unnoticeable norm during summer time.

Nowadays, such view is seldom found in Hong Kong and the sky is generally covered by haze most of the time. I made this shot couple days ago at my office window. It was such a nice magical moment of dusk. The used to be "normal" scene has become "rare" now.

Environmental protection is no longer a gimmick, but a necessity now.

The Pitfall of Email

Email is good, so good and damn good. It's one of the revolutionary inventions of the century changing the entire communication protocol in the world.

However, "email" has its affiliated side-effect/drawback. Misuse/abuse of email posts harm to communication especially in project management:

1. Printouts - In this Internet driven era, one cannot survive without an email account in business. But it is this undeniable necessity catalyzing one of the technology flops - "paperless office". Nowadays, people use email in almost every kind of business communication: memo, notice, announcement, meeting recap (minutes), requirements, negotiation records .......... with the capability of carbon copy to others in a click. The recipients (direct or indirect) have inevitably to "print" them out for reading, archive, filing or records.
2. Documentation by Emails - Formal training on software engineering emphasizes the importance of process and proper documentation. But this traditional view should be challenged by new generation of methodologies. Agile Software Development, Extreme Programming, Rapid application development (RAD) stress on the speed. Such emphasises may post misconception to programmers and developers. With the priority of "Speed", adhering to proper process and documentation practice are time-consuming (bureaucratic) and they simply ignore the documentation until the end of the project life-cycle. Emails then became their "information/documentation repository" and their email-boxes have become the pseudo file cabinets. (However, from my understanding, I find this is just an excuse for not doing it in most of the times).
   

I am not sure the situation of others, but based on my experience, the abuse of email in IT projects (as documentation repository for meeting recap, technical conclusion, software bug reports, and etc. during project execution stage) is getting bad over the past few years.

There is a simple test to verify the degree of email abuse in an IT project: ask any one of your project team-members about the latest technical discussion results during the last design meeting. His/her responses will tell you the severity:

• A - He/she gives you the answer verbally but no b/w records.
• B - He/she gives you the answer by referring to his/her email-box archived email.
• C - He/she gives you the answer by referring to the project document repository.
• D - He/she asks you to refer to the project document repository for the answer.

My current situation is 7:3 between "B" and "C". How about your projects?

Leadership #02 - Integrity

"Integrity" means a lot to leaders. Almost everyone knows what does it mean and why it is important to a leader (actually to all) and there is no need to further elaborate on this.

I would like to talk about an attribute of integrity: "no double standard". A leader should rule and manage the team, the department or the corporation based on the unique standard (whether on measurement of success/failure/performance/etc.). No matter how good a leader he/she is, his/her reputation or credit as a leader will be completely ruined when he/she demonstrates once in his/her lifetime, double standard in leading others.

However, it is easier to say it loud as a maxim than execute leadership with unique standard. That's why "leaders" are rare. Once upon a time, I worked for a company with full of dissatisfactory employees in my department because of the inconsistent standard of measurement exercised by the leader. Let's call the leader as Mickey. Personally, Mickey was a nice, experienced and intelligent executive. But he leaded the department using double standard. On one hand, he advocated and enforced the best practice of process and control at projects (for better quality) requiring proper process, control and documentation standards. But on the other hand, for some of his preferred projects, he allowed those projects proceeding without process and control, as long as the projects could be completed on time. The so called process and control within the organization became a fake.

This kind of "one organization, multiple standards" from a leader is not only lethal to the leadership, but it also affect the entire organization. On one hand, the subordinates' trust towards the leader will be jeopardized. Besides, such mistrust will spread accross the organization like diease.

In Chinese, there is an idiom about double standard: "只許州官放火，不許百姓點燈" (the rough meaning is: The official is allowed to do what he wants, but not the citizens) , which best describes the case of double standard.

Improvement by Practice

A true cleverness is determined by both "inborn intelligence" and "learned hardworking". Some people may not believe self-improvement by "hardworking". But from my personal experience, this is true. I can't change the former one and so the only way for my self-improvement is "hardworking".

After completing my part-time study last year, I focused on self-improvement and planned to develop my under-developed right brain. One of the ways is to train my not so frequently used left hand.

Being one of the usual right-handed majority, it was indeed not an easy target to me. But that didn't mean not possible and "hardworking" was the no tricky tactic. With 2 months of continuous "practice", nowadays, I am able to comfortably use computer mouse with my left hand, though it is still not as good as my right hand for some precision works such as graphic drawing. Therefore, "learning hardworking" is crucial to self-improvement, and so the cleverness of oneself.

Having said, first of all, you need a "left hand" ready computer mouse in order to train your left hand (Bear in mind most of the new mouses available in the market are designed for right-handed uesrs; a kind of discrimination).

P.S.: I have successfully trained my left-hand. But I am not sure if it can really help to develop my right brain. Let's see!

I Like the Bra - CRM

When talking about "CRM" (Customer Relationship Management). What would you think of? Don't be misled by those IT solution vendors where purchasing a suite of CRM solution (with a huge amount of price tag) can turn a company equipped with CRM. Lots of business entity (no matter MNC, SME to even individual entrepreneurs) are actually applying CRM to their businesses everyday.

One of the common tactics of building customer loyalty is the use of "membership" where members (customers) of a company can enjoy privileged benefits like special discount, early bird big sale promotion, discount or gift coupons during the birthday. Nowadays, people usually are the members of at least one or more retail companies like fashion shops, restaurants, and etc. They should frequently receive different kinds of promotional materials throughout the year. How many of them can really bring your surprise (and so the emotion/incentive to spend your money at them)?

My wife had such a nice experience from a company recently. Being the member of Triumph (the renowned brand of lady intimate apparel), she has received a birthday card from the company as a greeting and promotion. Different from conventional retail companies, Triumph not only sent her a delicated birthday card (nice 3-dimensional design) on time, but a $50 cash coupon was attached providing a solid incentive (I need to emphasis it's a true "cash" coupon, not discount coupon, that can be used in its shops without condition).

I am not sure if this can be a good example of executing a common CRM tactic in an effective manner (quality greeting & solid incentive) or not. But I do know that my wife was glad with the card (& the cash coupon, of course).

In summary, the two success factors I found for the CRM execution are:

1. A target focus greeting card (attractive card design to young female customers)
2. A real gift (cash coupon to creat the "privilege" feeling to customers)

Personally, I like the "bra" on the birthday cake of the card replacing traditional candles. A humorous, brand related (Triumph is selling bras) but not inelegant design.

Acceptance to Criticism

The degree of accepting criticism is declining with the growing age/seniority and this is the key barrier to self-improvement.

By analysing myself, I believe this symptom may be caused by the following reasons:

1. Stubbornness - the older a person, the more experienced he/she is and so the stronger the will.
2. Power blinds people - an unfortunate human nature.
3. Self-esteem - another unfortunate human nature.

Most people know that "open-mindedness is a virtue to continuous improvement. But this doesn't mean one can be "open-minded" easily.

LATE NOTE:
Just found a good example to reveal the challenge of "acceptance to criticism". One of the recent hot news in Hong Kong about the sex-related pages in the student newspaper (Student Press, CUHKSU) of Chinese University of Hong Kong demonstrates how difficult for people to listen and to accept criticism, regardless of ages.

Objectives

In project management, one of the fundamental elements in initiation stage is clear, well-defined project/business "objective(s)". This is a well understood 101 knowledge.

To my surprise, I found many people always forget this and they perform their works/assignments/tasks according to instructions/directives/orders without asking objectives (and so the completion/successful criteria). That should be fine for operational workers as their works are routine, repetitive basis. But that should not be acceptable to knowledge workers where most of their works have no standard but with many options and alternatives to achieve the same targets.

Such phenomenon may be caused by the abundant supply of so called "methodologies" and "best practices" where well defined working procedures and deliverables and even samples are clearly depicted. In theory, people simply follow (copy) such "methodologies" and "best practices" should achieve the best results. Unfortunately, this is not true.

For instance, I once managed a software project with high complexity in the implementation. In order to mitigate the risk of complexity, I assigned a project teammate to conduct an initial risk assessment during the early requirement analysis stage. The teammate did what I told him: He followed the company's project management framework and adopted the standard risk management template/procedure to carry out the work. At the end, I got a well written report with nice standard company format, plus rich content in full of very generic risk information (applicable to any projects) and there was little usage to the project (to identify and to evaluate possible specific risks in the project for early mitigation). What was wrong with him?

The teammate didn't ask the "objectives" of the assignment and he acted like an "operational worker" to manage the work per standard procedures. He didn't think what information should be required in order to achieve the "objectives".

Natural Born "Oneself"

During a meeting today, my supervisor mentioned the story of "The Scorpion and the Frog" to tells the truth that "nature" cannot be changed. It's true, something is naturally born and cannot be changed.

One of the suggestions proposed by many books about marriage is "Don't expect you can change the other half. You can only accept him/her or not". This suggestion is in fact also applicable to management.

This recalled one of my recently read articles "Managing Oneself" from Peter Drucker, one of the best masters/scholars in business management. In the article, Drucker realized the same truth and suggested ways to improve ourselves:

"The conclusion bears repeating: do not try to change yourself-you are unlikely to succeed. But work hard to improve the way you perform. And try not to take on work you cannot perform or will only perform poorly."

Black & White Photography

When I was housekeeping my bookshef last weekend, I found my portofilio of my early photographic work. Most of them are black & white photographs.

Remember the day when I first learnt photography was black & white photography based on Zone System, it was a joyful experience as I managed the entire photographic process from image composition, metering & exposure calculation, film development to photograph printing using full manual control (the manual-control camera, the manual film development tank, the manual print enlarger). It was a sophisticated process but I enjoyed the satisfaction of true photography.

This photo was taken at "Tung Ping Chau" in Hong Kong, a nice scenic location. It was a rainy day and I intentionally took the picture with low contrast acquiring a moody feel.

Nowadays, digital photography is so convenient with everything automatic and digitalized. Though creativity is the key to photography and most of the exposure and darkroom techniques are replaced by photo-editing software in computers, I do believe it is necessary to possess traditional photographic skill/knowledge (lighting, exposure, zone control...) so that the maximum enjoyment and achievement can be obtained through the viewfinder.

This photo was also taken at "Tung Ping Chau" with a high contrast image composition.

"Accountability" vs. "Culture of Fear"

Couple of years ago, I found "accountability" a very good management concept where

• One should be responsible for what he/she did under his/her scope of duties and
  
• "Root cause" of problems can be uncovered for improvement.
  

However, with the observation of how Hong Kong politicians make use of "accountability" as a "tool" to attack government officials in the recent years (Note), I am still reevaluating the proper use of "accountability" from management perspective.

With improper use of "accountability", adverse effect could be resulted causing damage to an organization. For instance, according to the book "The No Asshole Rule", professor Sutton points out one indirect example of improper management (misuse of accountability) by assholes:

"In a fear-based organization, employees constantly look over their shoulders and constantly try to avoid the finger of blame and humiliation; even when they know how to help the organization, they are often afraid to do it."

The result, of course, is a "lose-lose" situation to both the organization and the employees where people prefer to devote their energy protecting themselves, not helping the organization (improvement by addressing to root cause of problems). In the case of "politics", the situation is, of course, much more complex involving not just output and performance, but also power, benefit, ethics and morality. With the consideration of "politics", the conventional business management concept may not be applied directly.

Note: I didn't say those officials were doing good, but it was pretty sure that those politicians abusively utilize "accountability" for scold most of the time (in order to gain benefit like political status).