Ignoring Sycophants

Suppose you're some rich/powerful person. How do you prevent being surrounded by sycophants. Communication between two people is difficult and often leads to misunderstanding. Effective communication between different levels of a hierarchy is even more difficult. How does a Bill Gates or a George Bush get an accurate picture of what is really going on?

Almost by definition, they can only talk to people who are already in their orbit... people who may be just as much out of touch with reality. I suppose they must come to rely on gathering information from more impersonal sources -- e.g. reading articles, books, etc. where the author isn't affected by the inclusion of a Bill Gates in the audience. If they rely on advisors instead of impersonal sources, they're likely to be told what they want to hear instead of the truth.

For impersonal sources to offer meaningful criticism, the target of their commentary must be transparent -- i.e. only if they have access to the same general body of data as insiders can they offer informed observations. Whether in government or large corporations, secrets serve to arm insiders with knowledge hidden from general view. Insiders have a vested interest in preserving the shroud of secrecy, since this gives them power to control the debate. A leader surrounded by secrets can rely only on advice from people in on the secret -- a population with a viewpoint guaranteed to be warped by the sycophants it contains.

Effective leaders have figured out this dynamic; less effective leaders have not.

UPDATES: Fix punctuation; fix spelling.

Outcomes vs. Process

Some years ago, I worked at a couple of companies (EMC Controls, Digitrol/ITP Systems) that were in the process control and factory automation business. They have both since gone out of business, or been absorbed into other corporate entities. I bring this up as a way to segue into the topic of this post -- process vs. outcomes.

These companies were in the business of supplying process control to industrial customers. What we controlled was process, and by controlling the process, we affected the outcome. There is no such thing as 'outcome' control. That's not to say that there are not outcomes -- it's just to point out that in order to achieve some outcome, you choose the outcome as your goal, and then control the process used to achieve the outcome. The more effectively you control the process, the more likely you are to hit the desired outcome.... presuming, of course that the chosen process itself is capable of producing the desired outcome.

Choosing outcomes is relatively easy. Choosing effective process is much more difficult. Controlling a process (usually via measurement of some process metrics), once defined, is generally easier than choosing and defining the process.

Jeff Phillips wrote on a related topic back in July. To generalize the problem: how to choose an effective process so you are most likely to achieve the desired outcome?

In software design, one of the more useful concepts to come out in recent years has been design patterns. Can the idea of design patterns be generalized to help choose or design a process? Doing a "web search" (because Google doesn't want googling to become a verb), turns up a link or two. 

You get what you measure

You get what you measure.

This is an old and faithful management commandment that in my experience is sound advice. As in most things, the devil is in the details.

When I was at UPS  (developing software for their Package Systems division), they had an alphabet soup of different activities that they imposed upon management with the purpose of improving communication between manager and employee. One was called 'Talk-Listen-Act', or TLA. Management was required to schedule 'TLA' meetings with their direct reports. A manager's performance appraisal included measurement of the percentage of their TLA's that they had completed within the review period. Because their TLA 'effectiveness' was closely measured, all the managers within the unit where I worked dutifully scheduled and performed TLA's with their staff.

There may have been some value in having TLA's with some problem members of the staff, but for most, it represented a waste of time for both the manager and the staff member. The best thing that would come of it was perhaps a 'free' (i.e. expensed) lunch for both manager and staff member.

The TLA originated within UPS's operations divisions where the management is white collar and the 'staff' consists of blue collar truck drivers. In that environment, special steps had to be taken in order for management to have any one-on-one face time with their drivers, since the drivers were always out of the office, delivering or picking up packages. In that environment, having some more formal mechanism to encourage communication between management and their direct reports makes sense.

In the environment of software development, where management and staff interact face to face on a daily basis, having the formalism of a TLA was (is?) not a good use of time.... yet, because 'you get what you measure', a lot of cycles were burned to satisfy the metric that its measurement demanded.

In small companies, where the distance between the work you perform and the company's bottom line is short, it's easy to know what you should measure. In large companies, where employees are far removed from the company's bottom line, company management must invent the metrics against which performance can be measured. The choice of metrics is often driven by internal politics, the 'need' to build empires in order to climb the corporate ladder, and/or other motivations that serve their manager advocates more than they serve the business. Because the choices don't obviously flow to the bottom line, it's often difficult to evaluate the utility of the chosen metrics.

In politics, things are similar to the problems faced in large bureaucratic corporations. Instead of playing to the internal audience of corporate players, politicians play to a larger audience. For policy wonks, because their success is measured by the ability to advocate policies that will get adopted vs. the ability to advocate policies that actually work, we witness politicians advocating feel-good programs that have little chance of producing the desired outcome. Because we measure good intentions, good intentions are what we get. It's a wonder that anything works.

You get what you measure -- So it's hugely important (and often very difficult) to measure the right thing.