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Why improving requires change

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This isn't a how to post, as usual. Just an observation.

Photographer: Armand Khoury | Source: Unsplash

Quite often, an ambition to innovate is paired with an unwillingness to change.

Usually, the latter isn't conscious. But it blocks you from finishing or shipping anything.

It can be quite subtle. In how people speak or collaborate. In pushing back. In sub-par levels of trust.

It might seem obvious at the face of it. Yet, it's probably a common issue companies face when trying to become more innovative.

So before trying to convince anyone about a new product, you might be better off trying to introduce a smaller change of some sort, and seeing where the pushback comes from. And where the fault-lines actually lie. Even though it will create a conflict of sorts, it will highlight what you are up against.

Key takeaways

  • An ambition to innovate is often paired with an unwillingness to change.
  • Introduce a small change to test how a culture will deal with a bigger innovation.

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Why “work time” reduction is futile

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One of the common anti-patterns which comes from a more traditional project management toolbox is estimating work time. This estimate is later used as a tool to hold employees accountable. To help managers steer the ship, while making sure that utilization stays high. In particular, the measuring stick for good management is that employees are efficient. Over time, employees take less and less time to do a particular type of task.

Call me crazy, but this feels short-sighted to me.

If you are looking improving output and velocity of work (as opposed to employee efficiency) it goes up significantly when you have a solid team dynamic. Where people reach out and help one another, especially if they have different skill sets required to ship a particular feature. This a classic case of conventional management wisdom not tying true causes and effects together.

Ultimately what you care about is finished work. And finished work comes about quickly when a good team dynamic exists, not when individuals are efficient. To be blunt, this comes down to peer pressure dynamics among team members. For a team to work, they need to know what to expect of each other.

This is most obvious in team ball sports.

Any given player needs to pay attention to what everyone else on the court is doing, in order to figure out where to go next. Yes there is a coach on the sidelines, and a captain on the court, but the responsibility rests with the individual.

As the game is playing, could you imagine the coach getting off the bench and running after every player with a stopwatch? Telling them–one after another–to run faster? Anyone who the coach wouldn't be yelling at would slow down most likely. Because he's not getting grief from the coach, so why should he care? This might be more acceptable during practices, but even then, it takes away agency from the employee. And emotional skin in the game.

If you start measuring and tracking individual employee output:

  1. You send a pretty clear message that the team doesn't matter as much as what each employee does
  2. Success and failure rest at the individual level, how much they do relative to what their manager expects of them.
  3. The responsibility for finishing work lays on the manager's/coach's shoulders, and more importantly, doesn't lay on the employee's.

Maybe that's acceptable, and you want the extra control, but usually this will reduce your output. Because the motivation lies solely in the relationship between the employee and the manager. A hub-and-spoke dynamic among a group of people. Not a real team.

Speaking for myself, adding elements of control doesn't feel like it addresses the real issue of people not being self-motivated to work as a real team. It was kind of like buying additional dumbbells or books when wanting to shed a few kilos, like Keith Cunningham points out. It's helpful to have a one new pair, but buying 100x more dumbbells on its own won't burn the fat that much faster.

The root of the problem lies elsewhere: a misaligned team dynamic leading to a lack of individual motivation in the form of manager reprisal.

In contrast, if a player consistently gets the ball and fumbles with it or misses shots on goal, the team won't trust him. That's much more powerful motivator. They understand the consequences (to others) of dropping the ball on any given task.

Conversely, if there are a few good players who trust they can pass the ball to one another and to move their play forward, then things start to happen. Having a team dynamic where everyone chips in matters. Where people know who they can turn to if needed. So they're implicitly clear on priorities, as they enforce them from one another.

Or if you do have a star player, at least the team self-organizes around helping that star contribute significantly on the playing field.

How does overemphasizing work time play out quantitatively?

In scenarios requiring serial processing of work to ship something, like for example a software feature, you naturally start to observe bottlenecks. In particular, a lot of partially finished but unreleased work lies in the "wait states". The amount of time a given piece of work lies in between BA, development, and QA usually exceeds the amount of actual work time spent on it.

Here's a case study. Same time, same year, same product, same technology stack:

aggregate work time vs. aggregate elapsed time for all stories

This was a team that I ran when developing a new product. And what I'm showing here is pretty common. Few delivery people can overcome their "cringe factor". To figure out how much flab there is in a delivery process. In this case above, the aggregate elapsed time was over 3x longer than the work time.

Let's say we achieve a nearly impossible feat: halve the amount of developer work time without reducing the rate at which features were completed. All that would mean is that the purple bar in the stack above would be smaller. But the overall elapsed time wouldn't budge. The story would just wait longer for QA to be able to look at it.

Or halve the QA time required without reducing quality and rate of bug discovery. That would reduce the size of the gold bar. Which is admittedly a win at the story level. Because the elapsed time to the end of QA would go down.

But then you have the next step out: release elapsed time.

How much time elapses in between when all of the stories are QAed and the release goes out the door? If you don't have a continuous delivery pipeline, it could be weeks. So it doesn't matter if QA or dev go 20% faster, because the product won't end up in the client's hands until the product is released.

In practice all features are released together anyway. So even this pinkish elapsed time stack would need to be much taller when you count the time to release.

Key Takeaways

  • Increasing control doesn't help a team be more efficient, if the team members aren't motivated to collaborate.
  • Peer pressure similar to that in ball sports is a good model for how successful teams work together.
  • Strong-arming team members into finishing their work faster usually won't impact the "elapsed time" before the features/product goes out to market.

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How the infamous 1984 Apple launch commercial was canned…almost

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From the very beginning, Apple always had a flair for marketing. Mike Markkula believed that a fledgling venture needed to act like a successful company if it wanted to become one, at least in terms of external perception, and Steve Jobs always insisted on the highest possible production values, even while Apple was still in the garage. The Apple II was featured in an expensive, two page spread in the September 1977 issue of Scientific American, for example, even though Apple had less than twenty employees and minimal sales at the time.

Apple's advertising agency was Chiat-Day, founded by Jay Chiat in 1968. Jay Chiat was compulsively innovative, brash and irreverent, much like an older version of Steve Jobs, and the two hit it off great when they were introduced in 1981, just before Chiat-Day acquired Regis McKenna's advertising operations. Jay and his talented team, featuring Creative Director Lee Clow and star copywriter Steve Hayden, crafted Apple's first TV commercials, recruiting talk show host Dick Cavett as a spokesperson, and created the campaign that launched the Lisa, including a TV commercial that starred Kevin Costner while he was still unknown.

Toward the end of 1982, art director Brent Thomas and Steve Hayden came up with the idea of doing an ad campaign based on the timely tagline "Why 1984 won't be like 1984". Chiat-Day shopped it around to a number of clients, including Apple, where it was proposed to be used for a print ad in the Wall Street Journal promoting the Apple II. But Apple didn't go for it, and the idea was filed away until the spring of 1983, when they met with the Mac marketing team to start working on the launch, which was scheduled for January 1984.

Steve Jobs wanted to launch the Macintosh with an inspiring commercial that was as revolutionary as the product itself. He loved the Orwellian tagline when it was presented, and he encouraged the Chiat-Day team to pursue it. Steve Hayden and Brent Thomas put together an intriguing story board, envisioning a visually striking, highly symbolic, miniature science fiction epic featuring a young female athlete who liberates the subjugated masses from totalitarian domination by throwing her sledgehammer to smash a huge screen displaying Big Brother.

Macintosh marketing manager Mike Murray and Steve Jobs loved it, but they needed to get new CEO John Sculley's approval for such a large expenditure. Sculley was a bit apprehensive (after all, the commercial hardly mentioned the Macintosh), but he gave his OK for an unprecedented production budget of over $750,000, to make the one-minute commercial.

Chiat-Day hired the best science fiction oriented director they could find, Ridley Scott, whose previous movie, Blade Runner, possessed the visionary dystopian feel they were striving for. Ridley was based in London, so they decided to shoot it there, at Shepperton Studios. Several Apple and Chiat Day executives, including Mike Murray and Steve Jobs, travelled to London for the week of filming.

By the time the Apple folks arrived, Ridley's team had assembled a cast of almost 200. To play the oppressed, downtrodden baldheaded workers, his people recruited dozens of authentic British skinheads, paying them $125 dollars a day to participate. It was harder to cast the young heroine, since most of the models who tried out had trouble spinning with the heavy sledgehammer. Luckily, one named Anya Major was an accomplished discus thrower, and she could do it faultlessly, so she got the part.

When he arrived at the studio, Mike Murray went looking for Jay Chiat, who was supposed to already be there. He found him lurking off to one side, seemingly hiding behind some scenery. Apparently, some of the skinheads were in a nasty mood, and they were looking for trouble during breaks in the filming, so Jay thought it was prudent to make sure he stayed out of their way.

While the filming was taking place in London, I got a call from someone at Chiat-Day asking if I could write an Apple II Basic program to flash impressive looking numbers and graphs on the screen, to be overlayed on the image of Big Brother. I spent an afternoon cooking something up, and I sent it off to them, although I was never sure if it was used or not.

Lee Clow and Steve Hayden presented a rough cut of the commercial to the Apple team a few weeks later, and everyone was ecstatic. The commercial was classy, suspenseful and enigmatic, and seemed certain to garner lots of attention. It was shown for the first time at Apple's 1983 annual sales conference in Honolulu in October, with Steve preceding it with a clever rap positioning Apple as the industry's last alternative to IBM (see The Times They Are A-Changin'), to a rapturous reception, almost as apocalyptic as the commercial itself. The response was so great that Apple booked two expensive slots, for sixty seconds and thirty seconds, costing over a million dollars, to show it during Super Bowl XVIII, which was just two days before the Mac introduction.

Mike Murray and Steve Jobs screened the commercial for Apple's board of directors in December, to get final approval for the huge Superbowl expenditure. To their surprise, every outside board member seemed to despise the commercial, with Mike Markkula suggesting that Apple begin a hunt for a new ad agency. One of the board members remarked that it was the worst commercial that he had ever seen. Steve and Mike were devastated.

The chilling reception from the board compelled John Sculley to ask Chiat-Day to sell back both time slots that they had purchased. But Jay Chiat was true to form, and only sold off the thirty second slot, telling Apple that he wasn't able to get rid of the longer one at so late a date. Apple considered using the slot for a more conventional commercial, but in the end decided to take a chance on the 1984 spot.

The Mac team was told that the commercial would air early in the third quarter, at the first commercial break after the second half kick-off. Burrell and I wanted to see a real audience's reaction to the commercial more than the commercial itself (since we had already seen it plenty of times), so we watched the Superbowl at a sports bar near Stanford called the Oasis, with some other Mac team friends. The game was boring, but the bar was packed, and the commercial looked great when it aired at the designated time. We thought we heard a small murmur in the bar after the commercial, but it was hard to tell if there was any significant reaction.

That evening, we were surprised to see the commercial run again on the evening news shows. Apparently, it made such a big impression on lots of viewers that, coupled with the fact that it only was supposed to run once, it became a news item itself, as well as increasing expectations for the upcoming launch. It ran dozens of times on news shows in the next couple of days, gathering Apple over five million dollars worth of free publicity.

A week after the Macintosh launch, Apple held its January board meeting. The Macintosh executive staff was invited to attend, not knowing what to expect. When the Mac people entered the room, everyone on the board rose and gave them a standing ovation, acknowledging that they were wrong about the commercial and congratulating the team for pulling off a fantastic launch.

Chiat-Day wanted the commercial to qualify for upcoming advertising awards, so they ran it once at 1 AM at a small television station in Twin Falls, Idaho, KMVT, on December 15, 1983. And sure enough it won just about every possible award, including best commercial of the decade. Twenty years later it's considered one of the most memorable television commercials ever made.

This was a repost from folklore.org, a collection of war stories from Apple's early days.

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Disproved: Everything matters equally and I can just multi-task

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Usually, priorities come up in the context of time management and operational concerns. But did you know that having unclear priorities can also reduce revenue?

source: BAH, HBR

According to "Stop Chasing Too Many Priorities" by Paul Leinwand and Cesare Mainardi in the Harvard Business Review, too many operational priorities correlates with a given company's ability to outperform its peers in terms of revenue. Having too many "#1 priorities" will reduce revenue potential. It will be harder to communicate the vision to both customers and employees. Also harder to execute.

Multitasking increases cortisol, the stress hormone. For many tasks it produces an effect similar to a drop in IQ.

For example, lately, I've been focussing on writing. This is an activity that makes everything else easier for me or unnecessary. This insight comes from the book and podcast The One Thing. Mostly habits really. Habit formation is kind of a baseline for everything else to fall into place. It helps to be very deliberate about what habits you form, and to make sure that they're aligned with longer term outcomes.

I've endured phases of my life where I went pretty deep into personal development topics. Lately, I'm more interested in organizing my own work as well as that of my team. If we aren't agreed on what must be done, in order to kick start focussing time and other resources, then they likely won't get the inteded outputs. This is kind of a "captain obvious" truth. Especially when working on new products, if people don't at least have a clear goal defined, then it's easy for them to drift.

When scaling up habits to a workgroup level, though, it's worth pointing out that we're mostly trying to manage the work, not the workers:

Having the right habits means having habits like watching the baton. Making sure that, in fact, only one thing is done at a time and it's the highest priority item. That people are supported sufficiently. That everyone is clear on goals, even if the path to those goals isn't validated yet.

Multitasking works great in software, where there is no switching cost. Expecting humans to multitask.. bad idea.

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Disproved: Politcians claim entrepreneurship is the economy’s job growth engine

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When I was close to finishing a degree in economics, I was still a bit unclear about what actually causes economic growth after 4 years of study. Economists have a complicated and sophisticated set of models to understand how economies work, on both a theoretical and empirical level.

When it came to the topic of growth, if I remember correctly, the key factor underlying economic growth was productivity. And the primary driver of productivity were external technology shocks. Which can't be modelled. They're just assumed to happen. So basically, the economics department at PENN pulled an intellectual bait-and-switch on me. And I ended up going into software anyway.

Ultimately improvements in technology drove productivity and economic growth of countries. This was true of both developed and emerging economies, with the latter often benefiting from imported technologies, rather than creating their own.

Is entrepreneurship a job growth engine?

This blog doesn't cover politics. That said, I thought it might be worth drawing your attention to a half-truth that often comes up among politicians (and that's often repeated as conventional wisdom):

Entrepreneurship is an engine of growth.

Unfortunately, it's not really true if you look at the data. It is true the primary engine of growth are…high growth startups. These tend to be high technology startups or highly innovative ones. These are most likely to be hitting growth rankings like the INC 5000. In the US, these consistently make up a whopping 3% of all new businesses, according to Scott Shane in The Illusions of Entrepreneurship:

"In fact, only about 7 percent of new companies in the United States are started in industries that the government defines as high technology, and only about 3% of business founders consider their new businesses to be technologically sophisticated."

Industry breakdowns of high growth companies also reflect this insight. For example, on the INC 5000 for 2019, there are:

Source: inc.com

The 3% of technologically sophisticated startups made up around 30% of the INC 5000 in 2019. Thus as the startups grew, they are likely to be hiring rapidly. And creating jobs.

Conversely, 97% of new businesses fall into the category of a new hairdresser's, convenience store, or a new pizza joint around the corner. Necessary everywhere. But not particularly likely to grow rapidly. And hire rapidly. And that's totally fine. Most of these are sole proprietorships; the founder created his or her own job.

To be clear, growth is not an end to itself. Not every business should be designed to be high growth business. If this is the ambition of the founding team, then great. But just because it's a convenient soundbite for a handful of tech VCs and politicians, it doesn't mean it's the right choice for entrepreneurs. There are many potential measures of success and self-accountability. Growth, including job growth, is only one of them.

Keep your ears peeled during the upcoming elections, as this convenient half-truth is repeated by politicians all over the spectrum. It is, however, more in the category of "what voters want to hear", rather than actually being true.

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