Chapter 5. Great People
Cultural Assumptions
Geert Hofstede was born in Haarlem, the Netherlands, in 1928. He was 18 months older than Edsger Dijkstra, who grew up 70 km away in Rotterdam; both were young teens during World War II. After the war, Hofstede took his first trip out of the country—as a ship’s engineer—and ended up in Indonesia, where he experienced quite a cultural shock. Shortly after returning home, Hofstede took a trip to England, which gave him an even greater culture shock. He wondered what could make the English culture, only 200 km from home, so very different from his own.2
After a decade as an engineer, Hofstede joined IBM and got the opportunity to pursue this question. As a psychologist in the training department, he surveyed over 100,000 IBM-ers throughout Europe and the Middle East, looking for cultural differences that might be of interest during training. On a sabbatical from IBM, he started asking the same questions of people outside the company. Hofstede was surprised to discover great similarities in the way that people from the same country tended to answer the questions. Hofstede urged IBM to analyze the large database he had gathered, but instead the data was given to a university. Hofstede followed the data and became deeply engaged in analyzing it for correlations. Six years passed before he published a book on his results, and it took even more time for his work to be appreciated. But over time Hofstede’s work on cultural dimensions has been corroborated and expanded. Today, cultural dimensions are one of the most widely used framing tools in cross-cultural psychology.3
Hofstede found four dimensions in which national cultures instill in children deeply held assumptions about how to live: power distance, individualism, masculinity, and uncertainty avoidance. Later Hofstede realized that he had brought a Western bias to this work, so he collaborated with Asian researchers on a survey focused on Confucian values, and based on the results, he added a fifth dimension to his cultural perspective: long-term orientation. Figure 5-1 shows the relative cultural dimensions of a few countries.4
Figure 5-1 Geert Hofstede’s cultural dimensions for several countries
A brief explanation of each dimension follows:
• Power Distance: All cultures have an unequal power distribution among people, but in some cultures this is considered appropriate, while in others it is not. The extent to which the less powerful members of a country accept unequal power is the country’s power difference index (PDI). Russia, India, and France are examples of countries with high power distances.
• Individualism: Some cultures (all of them Western, with the United Sates at the top) emphasize individual achievement, while others (for example, South Korea, Russia, Japan, India) emphasize collective achievement and cohesive groups of people looking after one another. The extent to which the individual is emphasized over the group is the individualism index (IDV).
• Masculinity: Masculinity is the degree to which the culture accepts gender roles, expecting men to be assertive, tough, and focused on material success and women to be modest, tender, and concerned with the quality of life. Japan has the highest masculinity index (MAS), and Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, and Denmark have the lowest indices.
• Uncertainty Avoidance: Some cultures have a much more difficult time dealing with unpredictable situations than others. In cultures with high uncertainty avoidance you are likely to see an emphasis on rules and a low tolerance for the new, the different, the foreign. Surprisingly, you may also find more risk taking to resolve ambiguity. Russia, Japan, and France have a high uncertainty avoidance index (UAI); Denmark’s is very low.
• Long-Term Orientation: Confucius taught that virtuous people should acquire skills and education, work hard, spend no more than necessary, and be patient and preserving. This means taking a long-term view of work— for example, making decisions based on profits ten years from now instead of next quarter. Japan, South Korea, and India are examples of countries with strong long-term orientation (LTO). Canada, Great Britain, and the United States are among the countries with a very short-term orientation.
As children grow up, they learn what behavior is acceptable and what is not, how they are expected to act in the presence of elders, whether patience is a virtue, how much they are expected to look out for themselves and others. Adults instinctively understand the cultural norms they learned as small children, whether they agree with them or not. The cultural dimensions of a country are not the way individual people act; they are the way the culture expects individuals to act. These expectations are passed from one generation to the next during childhood; they are part of who we are and how we think.
The Cultural Heritage of Management Practices
When Hofstede was a young engineer, a manager from the United States interviewed him for a job. He brought an understated résumé and waited for the interviewer to ask about his past experience. But after an unsatisfying interview on both sides, he headed for the long train ride home without the job. Only when Hofstede became a manager and started interviewing both American and Dutch applicants did he discover what he had done wrong. He found out that Americans boasted in their résumés and in their interviews, something considered inappropriate in the Dutch culture. Clearly the American manager had expected him to sell himself aggressively, which never occurred to him. When cultural frames get misaligned in business, a lot of potential can be lost.
“Most management theories have been developed in the United States by Americans,” according to Nancy Adler, whose book International Dimensions of Organizational Behavior is in its fifth edition. “Rather than being applicable worldwide, many traditional models effectively guide thinking and action only within the American context within which they were developed.”5 This is particularly true of theories of motivation. Adler writes:6
Most motivation theories in use today were developed in the United States by Americans and about Americans. Of those that were not, many have been strongly influenced by American theories....
Unfortunately, many American as well as non-American managers have treated American theories as the best or only way to understand motivation. They are neither. American motivation theories—too often assumed to reflect universal values— have failed to provide consistently useful explanations for behavior outside the United States. Managers must therefore guard against imposing domestic American management theories on their global business practices.
Agile software development practices were principally conceived of in an American cultural setting, whereas lean thinking had its origins in a Japanese cultural setting. So it is appropriate to ask, “To what extent are agile and lean software development approaches constrained by their cultural heritage?”
Agile Software Development
Consider the principles behind the Agile Manifesto:7
1. Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
2. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.
3. Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
4. Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
5. Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
6. The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
7. Working software is the primary measure of progress.
8. Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
9. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
10. Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential.
11. The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
12. At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.
To American ears, all of these principles probably sound like good ideas. But in a culture with high uncertainty avoidance, several of the principles might create dissonance, especially ones that appear to discount the deep-felt need for predictability. Hofstede notes: “The need for rules in a society with a strong uncertainty avoidance culture is emotional. People ... have been programmed since their early childhood to feel comfortable in structured environments. Matters that can be structured should not be left to chance.... Countries with weak uncertainty avoidance can show the opposite, an emotional horror of formal rules.”8 Thus welcoming change (principle 2) and a bias toward oral communication (principle 6) may feel quite appropriate in countries that are comfortable with uncertainty, but countries with high uncertainty avoidance may find them less than satisfactory.
Self-organizing teams (principle 11) may seem like an obviously good idea, but Hofstede points out, “When power distances are large, dependence on more powerful people is a basic need that can be a real motivator.”9 So in countries with high power distances, teams are likely to feel more comfortable with more direction. On the other hand, when those countries also favor collective achievement over individualism, teamwork is likely to feel very natural. In countries that value individualism, teamwork may be more of a challenge; even the reward structures are likely to be incompatible with teamwork.
Countries with strong long-term orientation may not be quite as interested in early and frequent delivery of software (principles 1 and 3). In these countries it can be more important to create a consensus before implementing a system, and developing the capability to build high-quality software may be a higher priority than frequent delivery.
Lean Software Development
The way we discuss lean software development is similar to and supportive of the principles of agile software development, and it certainly has an American bias. But lean thinking has a Japanese heritage, and it is this heritage that makes lean concepts counterintuitive to Westerners. Consider the principles:
1. Eliminate Waste
2. Build Quality In
3. Create Knowledge
4. Defer Commitment
5. Deliver Fast
6. Respect People
7. Optimize the Whole
Probably the most challenging of these from a Western perspective are principle 4, “Defer Commitment,” and principle 7, “Optimize the Whole.” To countries with a long-term orientation, these are natural ideas. Delivering fast seems like a good idea to Western ears, until it becomes apparent that speed requires abandoning deeply held beliefs such as maximizing utilization. Creating knowledge also seems like a good idea, until the discipline of plan-do-check-act appears to slow everything down and people begin to wonder, “What happened to fast?”
Lean principles—whether in manufacturing, logistics, or development—seem counterintuitive and internally inconsistent in cultures with a short-term orientation. They tend to create dissonance in places where a focus on short-term results feels like the only rational approach. This is probably why lean initiatives have been so difficult to implement in a sustainable manner in Western cultures.
Company Culture
Perhaps one of the most remarkable examples of moving management styles across cultures is the growth of Toyota factories outside of Japan. In 1984 Toyota began its move to the United States, and the company focused the efforts of top executives for many years on moving the culture of Toyota—called the Toyota Way—to its plants in other countries.
The Toyota Way is very rooted in Eastern culture. The challenge then becomes how can Toyota possibly bring the Toyota Way to Western countries when its basic cultural assumptions are in some cases antithetical to the local culture? The answer to the question is that Toyota has brought key aspects of the culture to the West with remarkable success through a process of experimenting, reflecting, and learning.
[Toyota] leaders established the goal that they must transfer the essence of the Toyota Way to America, regardless of culture. Of course the first question was: what is the essence? Even that was not obvious as the Toyota Way was simply the way they did things. Through discussion, debate, and experimentation, and with the help of the Americans, they began to figure what elements of the culture needed to be transferred.10
Toyota recognized that its success in transferring the Toyota Way was all about people. The company carefully selected the right kind of leaders, trained them—usually in Japan—and then provided mentors who remained in the background, reinforcing the values, in decreasing numbers over the years. This is actually the essence of the Toyota Way anyway, so using it to move manufacturing outside of Japan was very natural. It required the persistence and patience that only a long-term orientation allows. Toyota president Katsuaki Watanabe said in an interview published in the Harvard Business Review11:
The Toyota Way has been and will continue to be the standard for everyone who works for Toyota all over the world. Our guiding principles define Toyota’s mission and values, but the Toyota Way defines how we work. To me, it’s like the air we breathe. The Toyota Way has two main pillars: continuous improvement and respect for people. Respect is necessary to work with people. By “people” we mean employees, supply partners, and customers. “Customer first” is one of the company’s core tenets. We don’t mean just the end customer; on the assembly line the person at the next workstation is also your customer. That leads to teamwork. If you adopt that principle, you’ll also keep analyzing what you do in order to see if you’re doing things perfectly, so you’re not troubling your customer. That nurtures your ability to identify problems, and if you closely observe things, it will lead to kaizen: continuous improvement. The root of the Toyota Way is to be dissatisfied with the status quo; you have to ask constantly, “Why are we doing this?” People can apply these concepts throughout the world, not just in Japan. The question is how long it takes to train people to develop the Toyota mind-set.
While they were exporting their culture, Toyota leaders took the opportunity to learn from other cultures and adopt values that would broaden their company culture. Slowly at first, and then over time with increasing speed, Toyota has expanded its global design and manufacturing presence along with its capability to create effective global teams. Toyota leaders truly understand: It’s all about people.
Frame 17: Knowledge Workers
Give me a fish and I’ll eat for a day. Teach me to fish and I’ll eat for life.
Peter Drucker, sometimes called “the man who invented management,”12 grew up in Vienna in the 1920s, moved to the United States in 1937, and wrote his most famous book, The Practice of Management, in 1954. Drucker coined the term knowledge worker in 1959 to emphasize the fact that knowledge workers were becoming an increasingly large portion of the labor force. By “knowledge workers” Drucker meant people who create value through mental rather than manual effort. Clearly, software systems are developed by knowledge workers.
Knowledge Worker Productivity
In his 1999 book, Management Challenges for the 21st Century, Drucker says:13
Six major factors determine knowledge worker productivity:
1. Knowledge worker productivity demands that we ask the question: “What is the task?” not “How should the work be done?”
2. It demands that we impose the responsibility for their productivity on the individual knowledge workers themselves. Knowledge workers have to manage themselves. They have to have autonomy.
3. Continuing innovation has to be part of the work, the task, and the responsibility of knowledge workers.
4. Knowledge work requires continuous learning on the part of the knowledge worker, but equally continuous teaching on the part of the knowledge worker. [Share the knowledge.]
5. Productivity of the knowledge worker is not—at least not primarily—a matter of the quantity of output. Quality is at least as important. Measure the “results” for a given enterprise and a given activity. [Don’t measure number of drawings or lines of code.]
6. Finally, knowledge worker productivity requires that the knowledge worker is both seen and treated as an “asset” rather than a “cost.” It requires that knowledge workers want to work for the organization in preference to all other opportunities.
Each of these requirements—except perhaps the last one—is almost the exact opposite of what is needed to increase the productivity of the manual worker.
If you reflect on these points, it should be blindingly obvious why we struggle when trying to apply management practices developed for manual labor to knowledge work. Most of these practices—concepts such as high utilization and low variation, identical processes and fungible resources—are the exact opposite of what is needed to increase the productivity of knowledge workers, as Drucker points out.
Peter Drucker believed that increasing knowledge worker productivity is the most important management challenge of the twenty-first century. According to Drucker, “Productivity of the knowledge worker will almost always require that the work itself be restructured and be made part of a system.”14 He insisted that the only way to measure knowledge worker productivity was to measure the outcomes of the system in which they work. Counting the quantity of the “things” knowledge workers produce—for example, how many stories were completed—is sort of like measuring how many students a teacher has in a class. This is not the way to measure productivity. What’s important is how well a teacher educates students, or how much value stories deliver to customers.
Drucker insisted that knowledge workers must improve their own productivity. “Work on knowledge worker productivity begins with asking the knowledge worker themselves:
What is your task? What should it be? What should you be expected to contribute? What hampers you in doing your task and should be eliminated?15
Results Are Not the Point
In knowledge work, success comes entirely from people and the system within which they work. Results are not the point. Developing the people and the system so that together they are capable of achieving successful results is the point.
“Fine,” you say, “but I have software to deliver, budgets to stay within, schedules to meet.” Indeed you do. But here’s the thing: Either your system is capable of delivering those results or it is not. Recall that in Frame 2: System Capability we recommended that you start by creating a time series chart of your current process capability. It will tell you what results your system is capable of. Trying to force results beyond what your development system is capable of might achieve results in the short term, but it will invariably make things worse over the long term.
You are not going to improve your system by stressing it to achieve aggressive targets. Systems don’t work that way. You may get a local or temporary optimization, but you will not get a system capable of delivering high-quality software reliably, repeatedly on time.
“It’s hard for Americans to understand the idea that a business organization cannot improve its long term financial results by working to improve its financial results. But the only way to ensure satisfactory and stable long term financial results is to work on improving the system from which those results emerge,” says H. Thomas Johnson, winner of the Deming Medal. He notes that the Deming approach and the Toyota Way “nurture the system and people who produce the results, rather than trying to force the system to meet targets beyond its current capability—a strategy pursued by virtually all large companies in the US today.”17
This is a very difficult concept to grasp, even for lean consultants. For example, a typical kaizen event at many companies might proceed like this: A group is gathered together to improve a specific operation. A facilitator, perhaps a consultant, guides the group in analyzing the operation and coming up with improvements. At the end of the week, the group reports to the management team and the improvement is either implemented or approved, depending on how long it takes to make the change. The savings are added to the list of savings that kaizen events have generated, to help justify continued kaizen events. Then everyone goes back to their real jobs, having done their part to improve the operation.
This may sound like a good approach, but it stands in sharp contrast to similar events at Toyota. In that company groups also gather for improvement exercises, but they are not called kaizen (which happens at one’s own workplace); they are called jishuken, or “voluntary self-study.” There is a sensei, or “teacher,” who gives the group a challenge, just as in the kaizen event described in the last paragraph. But that’s where the similarities end. At Toyota, the sensei gives the team no direct help and little guidance. When team members come for assistance, the sensei is likely to insist that they explain their thinking so far and then challenge the group further, asking tough questions. Individuals are expected to be motivated to improve themselves and their thinking, with the sensei as their mentor. In the end, the team will come up with ideas, run experiments, collect data, and implement effective countermeasures. The results are not tallied to justify the event, because what matters is the learning of the participants, not the results of their work. Team members expect to return to their jobs with improved problem-solving skills.18
It is extremely difficult for Westerners to understand that solving the problem is not what matters most; developing the problem-solving skills in people is what really matters. Think about training in a military organization. The outcome of the training is not important; it is the learning that matters. A jishuken is a training exercise, not a problem-solving exercise. People learn how to solve problems by solving a real problem, it is true, but the solution to the problem is not what solving problems is all about. People learn by solving problems so that they can get better and better at solving problems. Then they return to their workstation and use their problem-solving skills to improve the way they work.
So how do you get results? You start by making sure that work is structured so that it is a system—one that gives knowledge workers visibility into the needs and expectations of your customers. Then you focus on developing the technical capability of the system and of the people developing your products. You structure your delivery system so that workflows are steady and predictable. Finally, you develop workers who accept the challenge to continuously improve their system so that it delivers increasingly better customer outcomes. Nothing is going to get you very far if you do not grow and protect the people who understand customers, decide what tests to run, write the code, keep up the cadence, deploy the software, provide support, and constantly improve the system so it delivers more value to customers.
Frame 18: The Norm of Reciprocity
Treat other people the way you would like them to treat you, and they probably will.19
—James Parker
In Frame 7: Evolutionary Development we recommended that you try ethnography—closely observing what customers actually do—to gain a real understanding of what kinds of problems they struggle with every day. Ethnography was more or less invented by Bronislaw Malinowski, a Polish physicist and anthropologist, in the early twentieth century. This was a time of colonization, and the attitude of his contemporaries toward so-called primitive people struck Malinowski as condescending. His signature work was a study of the everyday life of Trobriand Islanders in New Guinea; he learned their language and observed the day-to-day behaviors underlying ownership, trade, and rituals. He was not surprised to find that the people were every bit as intelligent and creative as people in so-called civilized societies; they had developed a sophisticated culture that was well suited to their particular environment.
The people of the Trobriand Islands did not use the concept of money. Instead they used a system of mutual obligations to govern work and trade interactions. Malinowski showed that reciprocity—the inner symmetry of social transactions—was the mechanism that governed both work and trade. Food was obtained and distributed through “a well-assessed give and take, always mentally ticked off and in the long run balanced.” Enlightened self-interest governed life; people were generous in giving to others because they knew that in time they would receive more or less equal generosity from the recipient. When people did not live up to their obligations, the slighted parties reciprocated by not living up to theirs.
Malinowski wrote that without reciprocity, communities could not exist; reciprocity is the economic mechanism that makes communities work and the enforcement method that keeps exchanges fair.20 When you think about it, reciprocity facilitates the interactions of most non-market communities to this day, including open-source software. And it mediates most market exchanges that are built on trust-based relationships.
Reciprocity is a social norm, or expectation, that people will try to keep their interactions with others more or less in balance. People, in other words, want to live in a world they perceive to be fair. The norm of reciprocity means that you can expect favors to be returned, but you should also expect self-serving behavior to generate a self-serving response.
Remuneration or Reciprocity?
There are two kinds of companies in this world: remuneration companies and reciprocity companies. People who work in a remuneration company have this agreement with their company: “I will show up for work and you will pay me for my time. If you want more than that, pay me more. I return effort for remuneration.” On the other hand, people who work in a reciprocity company have this agreement: “I will treat you the way you treat me. I expect fair compensation, but if you want care and commitment on my part, then you agree that you will demonstrate care and commitment toward me, and you will help me develop my potential to its fullest extent.”21
Southwest Airlines is a reciprocity company. It has the highest productivity and the lowest turnover in the industry, and the way it achieves this is by treating employees as an asset rather than a cost. Former CEO James Parker says that the secret of Southwest’s success is its people; they are committed to the company because the company is committed to them. Southwest employees treat customers well because their managers treat them well. He says that there is no way to copy the Southwest model without copying its commitment to its employees—and he doesn’t mind revealing this secret because he doesn’t think that most other executives will really hear what he is saying.22
The norm of reciprocity suggests that when employers provide wages, benefits, and training that are perceived to be generous, employees are likely to reciprocate with increased discretionary effort. And if companies cut back on things employees have come to expect, employees are likely to cut back on their effort and loyalty to maintain a fair balance.23
In the United States, long-term commitment to employees has gone out of style these days. After all, the thinking goes, people will move from one company to another, so there’s no sense investing too much in them. But we think this is a vicious circle. The moment employees sense that a company cares more about its bottom line than its employees, the norm of reciprocity comes into play. Employees will withhold dedication from a company that is not dedicated to them.
Frame 19: Mutual Respect
The Toyota Way pillar of Respect for People continues to provide the framework for our company’s growth.24
One of the most important and yet the easiest way to practice reciprocity is to be generous with respect for other people. Since respect is free and returns are enormous, this is an investment with just about the best ROI in business. It’s amazing that more people don’t take advantage of it.
• Respect your organization’s customers—those who pay for, use, support, or derive value from the systems you create. Don’t waste their time. Don’t make promises you can’t keep. Don’t deliver systems with defects. Don’t fail to get their feedback, early and often. Don’t fail to provide what they really need. Don’t waste their money on things they don’t value.
• Respect your organization’s suppliers—the companies your organization contracts with for goods and services. Mutual respect between you and your suppliers can replace a lot of contract language and make trust-based contracts possible.
• Respect your immediate customers—the next team down the value stream. Find out exactly what they need and when, and be sure they get it.
• Respect your immediate suppliers—the next team up the value stream. Be sure they know exactly what you want and when, and be sure they have rapid, respectful feedback.
• Respect your subordinates—respect their time; do not ask them to do wasteful activities or work they cannot be proud of.
• Respect your teammates—be generous with your contributions and help teammates out so the whole team can meet its goals.
• Respect your managers—understand their concerns and help them be successful. If you think that managers are not treating you well, ask yourself how well you treat them. Managers are people, too.
Cross-Cultural Teams
The nature of developing software allows much of the work to move around the world in seconds, so it is increasingly common for development teams to have members in different countries, different time zones, and, most important, with different cultural contexts. Hofstede tells this cautionary story:25
In the early 1990s two European car manufacturers, Renault of France and Volvo of Sweden created a joint venture. In the IBM studies, France scored high on UAI and MAS [uncertainty avoidance and masculinity], Sweden quite low. A mixed team of engineers and technicians from both nations worked on the design of a new model. After a few years the venture was dissolved. French and Swedish social scientists interviewed the actors to find out what went wrong and possibly learn from the experience. D’Iribarne [who is French] described what they found:
“In the joint team, the French rather than the Swedes produced the more innovative designs. French team members did not hesitate to try out new ideas and to defend them aggressively. The Swedes, on the other hand, were constantly seeking consensus. The need for consensus limited what ideas they could present, even what ideas they could conceive of. To the Swedes the expression of ideas was subject to the need for agreement between people; to the French it was only subject to the search for technical truth. The French were primarily concerned with the quality of decisions; the Swedes with the legitimacy of the decision process. In the negotiations within the team, the French usually won. They had the support of their superiors who were involved all along, while the Swedish superiors had delegated the responsibility to the team members and were nowhere to be seen.”
It’s easy to detect that D’Iribarne wrote this from the French perspective. Hofstede concludes that even “the results of social research are not independent of the nationality of the researcher.”
Ignoring its bias, this story highlights the serious problems that can easily arise when teams work across countries with different cultures. Beyond language issues, economic differences, and technical backgrounds, there is a good chance that the team members will misunderstand each other’s basic approach to work. Culturally unassertive members can easily be bullied by the culturally aggressive members. Those who are uncomfortable with uncertainty may have little patience with those who want to examine multiple alternatives. Those who prefer having a leader who takes charge will not be comfortable with leaders who have a hands-off style. Those who are highly motivated by individual achievement will be frustrated by teams that place higher value on harmony and consensus—and vice versa.
The Value of Diversity
Just because working across cultures is challenging doesn’t mean it should be avoided. On the contrary, the best decisions are most likely to come from a team with people from many different backgrounds who enrich the deliberations with different experiences.
The thesis behind James Surowiecki’s book The Wisdom of Crowds26 is that a group of people can make better decisions than any individual, even the most expert in the field. But this occurs only under certain circumstances. First, the group has to have a diversity of opinions. If everyone thinks alike, the answer will be biased by the group’s bias. If people in the group have lots of different opinions, there will be far more perspectives and options to choose from. Variety and diversity give the highest probability that the best option will at least be considered.
Second, the people in the group have to be able to come to conclusions independent of each other. Without independence, you get the well-known groupthink phenomenon where the strength of opinions of individuals in the group or the predominance of opinion favoring a certain course of action sways those who hold different opinions. Research has shown time and again that people are strongly influenced by apparent choices of others around them. Thus not only should people make decisions independently, but decentralization is important, because it assures that individuals can draw on different experiences.
Finally, there must be a way to pool the private judgments of the group into a collective decision, without compromising independence of judgment based on diverse local knowledge. This may seem like a challenge, but it is much more easily done with software than with other endeavors. Open-source software, for example, creates an environment where Surowiecki’s criteria of diversity of opinions, decentralization of experience, and independence are all in place. The genius of open source is that private judgments are pooled into a collective decision through a combination of committer review and community comment.
If you want to capitalize on the value of diversity, you need to find a way to allow independent thinking while effectively pooling different ideas into an effective solution. You do not want everyone to be absorbed into a single homogeneous team, nor do you want segregated subteams. You want teams where people from different backgrounds develop a deep mutual respect for each other, while maintaining an appreciation for their own particular perspective.
Make sure that everyone truly understands that their particular outlook on life is not the only one in the world. While this may seem obvious, it is amazing how often it is not. People around the world think that their experience is the universal experience until they discover that it is not. Provide opportunities for these discoveries to be made by every member of the team. As team members learn to see beyond their own cultural frame, it is easier for a deep mutual respect to develop among all team members.
Self-Organizing Teams?
A typical orchestra has perhaps 100 musicians in different instrument groups, with a generally accepted hierarchy in each group. The orchestra is led by a conductor, and often the lead violinist is second in command. A chamber orchestra is smaller, with fewer than 50 musicians, and may call its leader a music director. But it is rare that you find an orchestra that operates like the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra in New York City:27
A self-governing organization, Orpheus was founded in 1972 by cellist Julian Fifer and a group of fellow musicians, who aspired to perform diverse orchestral repertoire using chamber music ensemble techniques. Today, Orpheus continues this philosophy, performing without a conductor and rotating musical leadership roles for each work, literally changing the way the world thinks about musicians, conductors, and orchestras. The orchestra strives to empower its musicians by integrating them into virtually every facet of the organization.
The New York Orpheus Chamber Orchestra is excellent, and its self-governing model works extremely well. Of course it is small (30 members), and members self-select based on their interest in the egalitarian model. But just because self-management works extremely well for the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra doesn’t mean that all orchestras should fire their conductors and rotate chairs.
We have seen many highly successful self-organizing software development teams, but we have also seen many relatively unsuccessful self-organizing software development teams. We have seen many very successful teams with deeply involved leaders, and we have seen many managers who suppress the initiative of team members. In short, we are quite sure that success does not lie in the model of team organization; it lies in striking the right balance between respect for people and excellent execution.
John Shook, senior adviser at the Lean Enterprise Institute and the first American hired by Toyota, considers a lean enterprise to be a socio-technical system— one that depends on both people and process for its ultimate success. He says:28
I like to refer to the Toyota Way as a socio-technical system on steroids. You have to work BOTH the social side and the process side to be successful with it. It has to be an integrated, balanced, total system ... the two—process and people—must be in balance. And I must say that I find that companies never get this right. They may err in either direction, on the social side or on the technical side, but they always err to one side to the detriment of the other.
In my view, when “continuous improvement” started, the initial emphasis was heavy on the social side. Teams, teamwork, empowerment, and all that. Sounded and felt good. But a lot of those companies never DID anything. And companies wondered why they didn’t get results. Then we had the imbalance in the opposite direction. Companies slammed the tools and processes in place, worker involvement and employee understanding be damned.
It’s the balance that makes the difference. The integrated balance.... And it’s the role of management to balance the two.
Unfortunately, we often find that the rationale for self-organizing teams stems from a belief that managers routinely interfere with development, so self-organizing teams seem like a good way to keep managers out of the way. In this case the term self-organization is taken to mean that managers are not supposed to influence the team, since that influence is presumed to be bad. Managers are supposed to get out of the way and leave the team alone.
The problem with this point of view is its obvious lack of mutual respect between developers and managers. We observe that a failure to understand and respect the other party—whether the other party is a manager or a developer— is the root cause of many problems in system development. But keeping the parties apart is not going to solve the underlying problem; it is far better to focus on creating mutual respect between developers and managers than to try to find ways to keep them apart.
Frame 20: Pride of Workmanship
Remove Barriers to Pride of Workmanship.
—W. Edwards Deming
W. Edwards Deming used an interesting technique to create respect between workers and their supervisors. He used to start out a consulting engagement by meeting with workers without supervisors present, but with a tape recorder. Then he would ask the workers to describe their frustrations at not being able to do their jobs the way they would like to do them. Usually the managers were shocked when they heard the tapes. They heard their workers say they knew their jobs depended on productivity and quality, understood what it took to do their jobs well, and yet were allowed neither to do a good job nor to fix the problems that kept them from doing work they could be proud of.29 So began the education of supervisors about how to respect their subordinates by removing barriers to pride of workmanship.
This would be of passing interest if it were a phenomenon confined to production workers in factories. But imagine Deming arriving at your office tomorrow and holding the same kind of meeting; what do you think would be said? Recognize that such a meeting can’t occur unless and until the person holding the meeting has a deep respect for the people attending the meeting and the people trust that they can speak freely without recrimination. With those conditions, imagine what might be said if the people you are responsible for were asked to describe things about their work that they find frustrating.
Enabling pride of workmanship is one reason why the relentless improvement we discussed in Chapter 4 is so important. It is also why we recommend that people learn how to solve their own problems. Teams should be given the time and mentoring necessary to investigate their biggest frustration, find the root cause, experiment with countermeasures, and implement the best one. And then do it again and again and again. When team members personally create an environment in which they can be proud of their work and work processes, you have made a good start.
Purpose-Passion-Persistence-Pride
We find that if people are proud of their work, proud of the way they do their work, and proud of the contribution their work makes to a larger purpose, they are motivated to do a good job, they persevere in their efforts despite obstacles, and over time they are successful. Pride comes easily when you have a personal connection with the people who benefit from your work, so understanding the purpose of work is important. Our recipe for an energized workforce is this: Make sure everyone understands the overall purpose of their work, generate passion around meaningful goals, recognize that hard work and persistence are necessary to be successful, and give everyone the opportunity to be proud of the way they work and the result of their efforts.
Portrait: Front-Line Leaders
Great leadership is most important at the front line levels of any organization because this is where a business most directly touches its employees and customers.31
—James Parker
There was a time when generals could direct a battle from atop a nearby vantage point, or personally lead a cavalry charge to exploit an enemy weakness. But with the improvement of small-arms capabilities in the 1800s, battlefields grew much larger at the same time that the pace of battle increased. Available communication devices were inadequate, and it became almost impossible for generals to keep track of what was going on, let alone exploit opportunities. But this did not keep them from trying. Tactics used in the American Civil War were hopelessly obsolete, and yet the generals on either side had no better ideas.
Meanwhile in Europe, the evolving weapons technology generated new thinking on battlefield tactics. It had always been clear that the army that could most rapidly exploit opportunities during battle would win. The question was, How could decisions be made faster? The biggest delay was in the time it took for information to go up the chain of command and commands to come back down. What if that delay were eliminated? What would it take for front-line commanders to be able to make decisions themselves?
Helmuth von Moltke (1800–1891) was appointed Chief of the Prussian (later German) General Staff in 1857. One of the important concepts he promulgated was Auftragstaktik (literally, “mission tactics”); a command method stressing decentralized initiative within an overall strategic design. Moltke understood that, as war progressed, its uncertainties diminished the value of any detailed planning that might have been done beforehand. He believed that, beyond calculating the initial mobilization and concentration of forces, “... no plan of operations extends with any degree of certainty beyond the first encounter with the main enemy force.” He believed that, throughout a campaign, commanders had to make decisions based on a fluid, constantly evolving situation.
Auftragstaktik encouraged commanders to be flexible and react immediately to changes in the situation as they developed. It replaced detailed planning with delegation of decision-making authority to subordinate commanders within the context of the higher commander’s intent. Moltke realized that tactical decisions had to be made on the spot; therefore, great care was taken to encourage initiative by commanders at all levels. For Moltke, “The advantage which a commander thinks he can attain through continued personal intervention is largely illusory. By engaging in it he assumes a task that really belongs to others, whose effectiveness he thus destroys. He also multiplies his own tasks to a point where he can no longer fulfill the whole of them.” Moltke’s thought, summarized in these statements, lies at the heart of mission command.32
Excerpts from the German army field manual, from 1933/1934 Truppenführung (Unit Command), demonstrate how the implementation of Auftragstaktik evolved after the first World War: 33
Section 4: Lessons in the art of war cannot be exhaustively compiled in the form of regulations. The principles must be applied in accordance with the situation. Simple actions, logically carried out, will lead most surely to the objective.
Section 6: The command of an army and its subordinate units requires leaders capable of judgment, with clear vision and foresight, and the ability to make independent and decisive decisions.
Section 7: An officer is in every sense a teacher and a leader.
Section 10: The decisive factor, despite technology and weaponry, is the value of the individual soldier. The battlefield requires soldiers who can think and act independently, who can make calculated, decisive and daring use of every situation and who understand that victory depends on each individual.
Military organizations are interesting because they can teach us the principles behind effective small units, and certainly we would like effective small teams in our companies. Figure 5-3 summarizes the difference in thinking between mission command—the delegation of local decisions to local unit leaders—and detailed command—the kind of military command that usually comes to mind when we say command and control. Amazingly, we see that mission command, on the left side, lines up very well with agile values, whereas on the right side we see that detailed command rests on quite the opposite perspective. However, both mission command and detailed command are approaches to command and control. It just happens that military organizations have found that mission command works much better.
Figure 5-3 Two approaches to command and control (U.S. Department of the Army, Mission Command: Command and Control of Army Forces, field manual, 2003, p. 1-15.)
Leaders who use mission command assume that the world is unpredictable; they accept uncertainty and even disorder. This tends to lead to loose reins, self-discipline, initiative, and cooperation. They look for acceptable decisions sooner rather than optimal decisions later. Ability is developed at all levels of the organization rather than at the top. Rather than sending detailed directives through a hierarchy, mission command communicates command intent. Because responsibility for the details is delegated to front-line leaders, operations can proceed at a much higher tempo.
And a higher tempo is important. John Boyd was a U.S. fighter pilot who has had a significant impact on both military and business strategy. He observed that decisions are made in cycles of Observe-Orient-Decide-Act, a cycle that is often called the OODA loop. Boyd theorized that organizations that can complete this decision loop faster than their competitors will inevitably beat those competitors.
Note that Boyd’s loop is not34
O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O→O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O→D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D→A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A
It is
O-O-D-A→O-O-D-A→O-O-D-A→O-O-D-A→O-O-D-A→O-O-D-A→O-O-D-A→O-O-D-A
In the introduction of this book we asked, “What do Svenska Handelsbanken, Nucor Steel, SAS Institute, W. L. Gore, Southwest Airlines, Semco, and Toyota have in common?” Each of these companies has developed a culture of high involvement, each thrives in an industry of high change, and each has sustained best-in-industry performance over time. The leaders at these and similar great companies realize that their world is moving too fast for information to go up the chain of command and instructions to come back down. In order to compete effectively, they have shortened their response loop. They do this the same way military organizations around the world have learned to respond quickly to uncertainty and discontinuous change: They focus their attention, training, and organizational energy on making sure that they have great front-line leaders.
“Excellence throughout an organization requires consistent performance at all levels by employees who understand their company’s mission, who understand their role in achieving it, and who are dedicated to accomplishing that mission,” James Parker wrote. “Their information, knowledge, and inspiration will come, to a great extent, from the immediate manager or supervisor who most directly touches them and affects their lives.”35 This is the secret of Southwest Airlines that was missed by those who tried to copy its success. And it is the secret of every great organization we have encountered.
Your Shot
1. If you have cross-cultural teams:
a. Have everyone look up the Hofstede indices of the culture of their childhood.36
b. Ask each person to give a short presentation of these indices and discuss whether they seem to be a good representation of their home culture (not them personally).
2. Are all members of your development team considered “knowledge workers”? Are they treated as an “asset” or a “cost”? Would everyone on the team agree with your answers?
3. Make time for a discussion with everyone whose work assignments you influence:
a. What are you good at?
b. What do you like working on?
c. What aren’t you good at?
d. What would you rather not work on?
e. What is your job?
f. What should it be?
g. What should you be expected to contribute?
h. What hampers you in doing your job and should be eliminated?
4. Have your team list as many communities as they can where the norm of reciprocity governs member contributions and interactions. Then list as many organizations as possible where contributions are governed mostly based on remuneration. Which organizations work better?
5. List which human resources practices in your company are focused on managing behavior through remuneration, and which are more focused on managing behavior through the norm of reciprocity. Which approach are you more comfortable with? Which seems to work better? Why?
6. Do people on your team respect their managers? Do they know what their managers’ goals are? Do they try to help their managers meet their goals?
7. Let’s say I am a developer or tester in your organization. Could I answer these questions:
a. Who knows me and looks out for my welfare?
b. Who decides what team(s) I work on?
c. Who guides my work?
d. Who helps me when I have problems?
e. Who cares if my work gets done—well? f. Who provides feedback on how well I am doing?
g. Who makes sure that I have the necessary training, information, and tools?
h. Who lets me know the purpose of my work and inspires me to work for that purpose?
i. Who takes care that my assignments provide opportunities to learn and advance?
j. Who keeps me informed about what is going on in the company?
k. Who decides on my compensation?
l. Who cares about my career?
Endnotes
