Monthly Archives: October 2018

Book Notes : The Phoenix Project

The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is in a story form following someone who has just been promoted and he is trying to deal with a whole lot of different problem but the biggest in The Phoenix Project.  Ignoring the plot the book looks at the following:

The four different types of work

  1. Business projects
  2. Internal projects
  3. Operational changes
  4. Unplanned work (the silent killer which is usually very urgent and very important displacing planned work)

The three ways

The First Way : System Thinking

Here it is about looking at the system as a whole and realising that value does not exist until something is available to the customer.  Thinking at the whole level it is important not to pass known defects downstream, not to let local optimisations make the whole system worse, allows you to look at increasing flow and achieve a full understand of the system as a whole value chain.

The Second Way : Amplified Feedback Loops

Here the aim is to produce learning and build up knowledge, by shortening and amplifying the feedback loops as well as understanding and being able to respond to customers both internal and external.  Realising that value is only delivered when they get to the customer.

The Third Way : Culture of Continuous Experimentation and Learning

This is to build an organisation which is able to take risks and thus experiment.  This learning can build a more resilient and dynamic organisation.  This allows time for the improvement of daily work, creating rituals that reward the team for taking risks and introducing faults into the system to increase resilience.

Theory of Constraints – The Five Focusing Steps

  1. Identify the current constraint
  2. Exploit, make quick improvements to the throughput of the constraint using existing resources.
  3. Subordinate, review all other activities in the process to ensure that they are aligned with and truly support the needs of the constraint.
  4. Elevate consider what further actions can be taken to eliminate it from being the constraint.
  5. Repeat, once one constraint/bottleneck has been removed then another point will start being the bottleneck.

If a task does not add any of the following benefits why is it being done? Improvements to:

  • Capacity of a constraint
  • Scalability
  • Availability
  • Survivability
  • Sustainability
  • Security
  • Supportability
  • Defensibility

Work centres consists of 

  1. Machine
  2. Operator
  3. Method
  4. Measure

Book Notes : Primal Leadership

Primal Leadership: Unleashing the power of Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee
My rating: 4.5 of 5 stars

Leaders have the highest power to sway our emotions, this can be maximised when their leadership resonates with the people who they lead. This is because there is an open loop between leaders and the people who follow them, this results in a mirroring of the leaders because people pay more attention to what they say and importantly what they do – their emotional reaction has a huge impact. These leaders don’t need to be the formal leaders, but could be the teams emotional leader. This emotional watching results in a contagion of whatever the leader says or does. An emotionally positive mood has significant impact on the group and on results, and because of the impact a leader has this is generally stems from them.

Emotional Intelligence Domains and Associated Competencies

  • Personal
    • Self-Awareness
      • Emotional self-awareness: Reading one’s own emotions and recognising their impact; using “gut feel” to guide decisions
      • Accurate self-assessment: Knowing one’s strengths and limits
      • Self-confidence: A sound sense of one’s self-worth and capabilities.
    • Self-Management
      • Emotional self-control: Keeping disruptive emotions and impulses under control
      • Transparency: Displaying honest and integrity; trustworthiness
      • Adaptability: Flexibility in adapting to changing situations or overcoming obstacles
      • Achievement: The drive to improve performance to meet inner standards of excellence
      • Initiative: Readiness to act and seize opportunities
      • Optimism: Seeing the upside in events
  • Social
    • Social-Awareness
      • Empathy: Sensing others’ emotions, understanding their perspective and taking active interest in their concerns
      • Organisational awareness: Reading the current, decision networks and politics at the organisational level
      • Service: Recognising and meeting follower, client or customer needs
    • Relationship-Management
      • Inspirational leadership: Guiding and motivating with a compelling vision
      • Influence: Wielding a range of tactics for persuasion
      • Developing others: Bolstering others’ abilities through feedback and guidance
      • Change catalyst: Initiating, managing and leading in a new direction
      • Conflict management: Resolving disagreements
      • Building bonds: Cultivating and maintaining a web of relationships
      • Teamwork and collaboration: Cooperation and team building

These result in the following leadership styles

  • Visionary
    • How it builds resonance: Moves people towards shared dreams
    • Impact on climate: Most strongly positive
    • When appropriate: When changes require a new vision or when a clear direction is needed
  • Coaching
    • How it builds resonance: Connects what a person wants with the organisation’s goals
    • Impact on climate: Highly positive
    • When appropriate: To help an employee improve performance by building long-term capabilities
  • Affiliative (relationship building)
    • How it builds resonance: Creates harmony by connecting people to each other
    • Impact on climate: Positive
    • When appropriate: To heal rifts in a team, motivate during stressful times, or strengthen connections
  • Democratic
    • How it builds resonance: Values people’s input and gets commitment through participation
    • Impact on climate: Positive
    • When appropriate: To build buy-in or consensus or to get valuable input for employees
  • Pacesetting
    • How it builds resonance: Meets challenging and exciting goals
    • Impact on climate: Because too frequently poorly executed, often highly negative
    • When appropriate: To get high-quality results from a motivated and competent team
  • Commanding
    • How it builds resonance: Soothes fears by giving clear direction in an emergency
    • Impact on climate: Because so often misused, highly negative
    • When appropriate: In a crisis, to kick start a turnaround or with problem employees

Jumping between all four resonant leadership styles Visionary, Coaching, Affiliative & Democratic can prove a great mix for a leader.  If a leader constantly uses the Pacesetting or Commanding style this can have very negative impacts on the team and can cause toxic organisations.

CEO Disease : The information vacuum around a leader when people withhold important and sometimes unpleasant information.

Self-directed learning through the five discoveries:

  1. My ideal self: Who do I want to be?
  2. My real self: Who am I?
    1. My strengths: Where my ideals and real self overlap
    2. My gaps: Where my ideal and real self differ
  3. My learning agenda: Building on my strengths while reducing gaps
  4. Experimenting with new behavior, thoughts and feelings
    1. Practicing the new behavior, building new neural pathways through to mastery.  Bring bad habits into awareness, consciously practice a better way and rehearse that new behavior at every opportunity
  5. Developing trust and relationships that help, support and encourage each step

Listening to peoples feelings people tend to come to a consensus and paint a picture of an organisation.

When looking to spread a new culture it has to be championed widely, else the people who are evangelised the new culture first could be shot down by other parts of the orgsanisation who have not been informed about the new direction.

Book Notes : Leading Snowflakes

Leading Snowflakes: The Engineering Managers Handbook by Oren Ellenbogen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Overall this is an ok book but there are a couple of nuggets in it which are quite useful.

Initially there is the highlight the difference between makers and managers – the role of the manager being to amplify the team. It highlights the importance of balancing making and managing and the need for concentration in the making zone. The key for managers is not to measure your output but the output of the team.

When making something we can review it quickly, such as by running unit test on our code. As a manager we rarely review the decisions we make to actively learn from them. The book highlights the importance of this and proposes a template to achieve this and get more continuous feedback. These decisions could be to postpone a decision, but this itself is a decision. There are no right or wrong just different takeoffs between different approaches.

The importance of feedback is discussed and this being hard as a transition from a team mate to a team leader. I diverge from the book here as we should not only be getting feedback from the leader, all members of the team should feel comfortable providing feedback but it might be that the team leader needs to deal with harder situations. Dick Costolo, Twitter’s CEO, uses the term “The Leader’s Paradox” – as managers and leaders, we need to care deeply and thoroughly about our people, while not worrying about what they think of us. It is key to share your own lessons learned, to summaries and share written feedback, using the wrong medium to present a message and delaying feedback.

Getting things done by extreme transparency, reducing risk (releasing smaller chunks etc), planning, leverage peer pressure, retrospect & delegate. Using the Must, Delegate and External lists – where Musts are absolute musts that as a manager we must do, if it is not a must then we can delegate it. External are things which are outside of your sphere which impact you.

When moving from maker to manager people approach it with a view of productivity. In reality building trust should be a higher importance, both inside the team but (crucially) with other teams.

Optimise for value. Depending on the product phase this could be focusing on Acquisition – how to bring in more users, Activation – increasing the usage of the product, Retention – keeping the users using our product, Referrer – having happy customers who recommend our product, Revenue – making more money or gaining more customers. When we are uncertain optimise for getting answers fast, “If you can’t make engineering decisions based on data, then make engineering decisions that result in data.” (Kent Beck). When we have business certainty, optimize for predictability and optimise bottlenecks. “Companies fail when they stop asking what they would do if they
were started today, and instead just iterate on what they’ve already done.” (Aaron Levie) this statement is a bit contentious as there are many re-writes which have failed so this is not a proven answer but reviewing what you would do with what you know now is a very important task to undertake.

“Culture is to recruiting as product is to marketing.” (Dharmesh Shah). This is what attracts employees and keeps them. Building an inbound feed of candidates by showing what you are doing, exposing your culture and demonstrating your tech to attract people to work for you.

To build a salable team requires an alignment of vision (Will it move the company into a winning position? Is it big enough as an engineering challenge?), alignment of core values without which the team will self-destruct as such it might mean loosing some key individuals (e.g. Never let someone else fix our own mess, Loyalty to each other above all), distributed responsibilities (What can you expect of me? What can you expect of being part of this team?), sense of accomplishment.

You can’t empower people by approving their actions. You empower by designing the need for your approval out of the system (Kris Gale)

Book Notes : Great Boss Dead Boss

Great Boss, Dead Boss: How to exact the very best performance from your company and not get crucified in the process by Edgar H. Schein
My rating: 4.5 of 5 stars
This is a book written in a story style which presents the idea of tribes and how these are how people in a business operate.

The book presents tribal dimensions:

  1. Individuals are socially, emotionally, and psychologically defined by their tribal membership.
  2. Individual Security (IS): Individuals act to reinforce their security when under threat.
  3. Individual Value (IV): Individuals act to reinforce their self-worth when their security is not under threat.
  4. Tribal Security (TS): Tribes act to secure their self-preservation if their security is under threat.
  5. Tribal Value (TV): Tribes act to reinforce their self-worth when their security is not under threat.

Though the book various things happen which are then evaluated against the dimensions in a positive or negative way.  Initially the idea of positive tribal and individual security is presented as a bad thing resulting in complacency, process focus, rules and regulations, in fighting and backstabbing, taking no risk or innovation however during the rest of the book TS+ and IS+ are presented as good things – to me security is more nuanced than positive or negative.

The book presents a continuum from corporate failure at TS-IS- up to TV+IV+, as follows, with actions to progress to the next stage.

Status Action
TV+ IV+ Maintain the status quo.  Set new just cause.
TV- IV+ Work to improve TV+. Reinforce super tribe.  Emphasis just cause.
TV- IV- Reaffirm individual’s capability.  Define common enemy.
TV+ IV- Identify source of IV-, create new source of IV+
TS+ IS+ Define and create new source of TV+ Create new superordinate tribe.  Create source of IV+
TS- IS+ Reinforce the rite of passage.  Reinforce common enemy.  Reinforce just cause.
TS- IS- Redefine source of power, just cause, common enemy.  Replace leadership.
TS+ IS- Reaffirm IV+, beware of sub-tribes, seeing others as common enemy.  Replace leadership or reeducate leaders.

The book presents tribal attributes:

  1. A strong tribe must have a common enemy.
  2. A strong tribe has clearly defined symbols.
  3. A strong tribe offers a super ordinate identity to all sub-tribes.
  4. A strong tribe has a credible, just cause for its continued existence.
  5. A strong tribe has an accepted rite of passage.
  6. A strong tribe has clear external measures of success.
  7. A strong tribe understands and protects its source of power.
  8. A strong tribe knows how it compares to the “untouchables.”
  9. The criteria for tribal membership are clear and credible.
  10. Tribes communicate in a non-traditional, subjective, and intuitive manner.
  11. A strong tribe develops its own unique language.
  12. Tribal roles are fundamentally different from accepted functional roles.
  13. Strong tribes record and celebrate significant events that reinforce their identity and value.
  14. A strong tribe has a clearly defined and well-known justice mechanism.
  15. A strong tribe has a clearly defined icon that embodies the tribal value.
  16. A strong tribe has a walled city–a place of refuge where things of value to the tribe are kept.
  17. A strong tribe possesses objects of value that embody the tribe’s value.
  18. A strong tribe has a revered figurehead.
  19. A strong tribe celebrates and cares for the skills, tools, and implements required for its prosperity.
  20. A strong tribe expects unquestioning loyalty.
  21. A strong tribe has clearly defined roles, responsibilities, values, authority, power structure, and chain of command.
  22. A strong tribe has a leader dedicated to the tribe’s success.
  23. Strong leaders have capable mentors whose psychological limits exceed their own.

The book provides a grid detailing communication between tribes and individuals and their impact.

Communication Result
Enemy Tribe to Tribe Potential to harm or destroy the tribe, creates TV- or TS-
Ally Tribe to Tribe Has potential to strengthen the tribe. Creates TV+ or TS+.
Enemy Tribe to Individual Expulsion, eviction, discipline, creates IV- or IS-
Ally Tribe to Individual Promotion, join inner circle, seat on the board creates IV+ or IS+
Enemy Individual to Tribe Company sabotage, leak secrets, spread rumours, creates TV- or TS-
Ally Individual to Tribe Supports the just cause, attack common enemy, creates TV+ or TS+
Enemy Individual to Individual Dislike one another, threats and accusations. Creates IV- or IS-
Ally Individual to Individual Good friends, supportive creates IV+ or IS+

The book presents a list of tribal and organisational roles, this is not very well explained and magically the book restructures the organisation by magic.

Tribal Role Traditional Organisational Role
Hunter Sales person
Farmer Manufacturing
Care giver Human resources
Cheif CEO
Elder Board member
Herder Accountant
Story Teller Advertising
Witch doctor Financial analyst
Spy Public relations
Builder Maintenance

 

Book Notes : Humble Inquiry

Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling by Edgar H. Schein
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
The book introduces three types of humility basic humility – the status in society you are born with, optional humility – the way we feel when in the presence of someone who has done great thing and here-and-now humility – when you are dependent on someone else. The humble inquiry comes from a place of interest and curiosity with here-and-now humility, this maximises the interest in the other person and minimises bias and preconceptions.

The book talks about espoused values, the values which we openly talk about e.g freedom, equality, etc, however these are sometimes in contradiction to tacit assumptions which are the values which are actually in action, e.g. poor education, discrimination. The problem with the humble inquiry is that cultures which value task accomplishment over relationship building and telling over discussing means there are cultural forces working against it.

The Johari Window contains four sections:

  • Open Self – things we know about our self and others know too
  • Concealed Self – things we know about our self but we hide from others
  • Blind Self – things we don’t know about our self but others know
  • Unknown Self – things which are known neither by our self nor by others

Through the use of the Humble Inquiry we can expand the amount of Open Self which a person feels confident to display, reducing the Concealed Self.