My Life Blog

Oh boy, this is going to be trouble. But since my readership is small, they’ll never know my tiny blog weighed in on such a “heavy” subject. Such is the subject of the virtues of small companies. I’m referencing the prevailing theme at 37Signals, a gracefully written counter-account from Mena at Six Apart, and a counterpoint posting by 37Signals.

37Signals is a small company and gets maximum value out of their few employees. They have several successful products and do consultancy work. From their company came Ruby on Rails and that framework is flourishing in the Open Source community.

I don’t know much about Six Apart other than what I read today and the fact that this weblog is hosted by them. The latter factor doesn’t bias me in the least. They are apparently a funded company that has grown from few to many. And like 37Signals, they are enjoying some success. I do not know the specifics of either company’s financials, I am just going on buzz and intuition.

The sparring today seemed to be based upon big companies versus small companies. But let’s face it, Six Apart only has 80 people and that’s hardly a big company. To some degree, they are unadmitted peers and I think they are in violent agreement.

The argument being made for small companies is that you can achieve as much with a small company as you can with a big company, so there’s a certain prideful feeling about remaining small and achieving perceived big things. I hesitate to say this, but I think pride and ego play a part in this tournament. And I feel its mostly from one side.

Big companies can achieve big things. Their size enables them to scale and bring much to bear on the problems that they solve. Let’s face it, if you are a small company, your potential is bound to be limited. You just cannot be Amazon with a team of five. That’s not a knock on 37Signals, its a matter of math or physics.

Achieving big things is a matter of execution. With a team of five, there are fewer connections in their network to support, so naturally communication is more apt to be efficient. Many big businesses go astray because they cannot scale their production along with their size. In my opinion, this is an organizational issue. You can structure your organization so that it efficiently handles the communications required across your vast number of employees. However, not every node will or should be connected. The goal should be to conscientiously keep the connections that matter efficient. Accountability and empowerment should be preserved in this structure. What I’m trying to say is that you can be big, think big, and act small at the same time. To me, the size of your company has less to do with what you can achieve than your ability to organize, communicate, and execute. Small teams can be dysfunctional too.

Personally, I like being a part of a small company. However, being a part of a well-run big company is okay too. Either has a chance to be successful. In my opinion, the small company can evolve to a big company and still preserve its small company culture. Growing in size is sometimes necessary to increase the potential for bigger things.

And as I’ve said before, just my opinion, I could be wrong…

I am about to start a new book called Think Big, Act Small by Jason Jennings.  I am hoping this book will affirm a long-held belief of mine that big companies should adopt elements of the startup business culture to add a sense of urgency and accountability to every day tasks.

Since that’s a mouth-full, allow me to elaborate.

In my experience at big companies, I have found that they like to partition off competence areas into separate groups.  As a part of a competence group, members often co-locate, train together, meet together, and report to someone within their area.  When needed, they are mixed into a project team, but its a loose coupling.  In most cases, accountability seems to be stronger within their competence group and weaker within the project team.  In my opinion, the accountability is misdirected, thus leaving the possibility for project concerns to go unfulfilled.  And they often do.

I’m quite sure that I haven’t made the problem quite clear, but in the interest of keeping this short, I’m going to move to my solution. 

At a startup, you take a collection of people with various competencies, give them a mission, and then they make it happen.  Each person is accountable to their role, but contributes to the overall mission.  In short, they work as a hungry startup whose mission is to seed and grow the business.  And so basically, you cannot succeed individually when the business itself is failing.  You wear all hats necessary and are accountable for more than your own competency.

So the question is: how can you achieve this within the context of a big company? 

To be honest, I’m not sure.  My dream scenario is to have a company be logically divided into a series of small companies from an organizational perspective.  Each small company has their own CEO, CTO, COO, etc.  Each has their set of metrics and each employee is accountable for all metrics, but some more than others.  When you as an employee are allocated to a company, you have full skin in the game.  Management of a small company has mostly-free reign to make things happen as they need to.  They must business plan, execute, hire, fire, etc. 

Employees start in a competence group, but are hired out of their group and allocated to a small company.  When this happens, all reporting ties are broken with their competence groups.  They now become accountable to their business.  Employees that are fired or retired must seek out their next position.  To stay on the bench and not be utilized would make them vulnerable to downsizing.

I rushed through the explanation, but to me this makes a lot of sense.  In most matrix-based organizations accountability has mostly been lost.  People please their competency group, but disappoint their projects.  They make their competency group goals, but fail the project goals.  And continued employment and bonuses are often based upon their standing in the competency group as opposed to their ability to bring their competency to bear within the context of a project.

As I’ve read this back over, it appears that I’ve all but duplicated the organization structure of a consulting firm and their engagements.  But I think its much different duplicating this organization structure in a big company.

If anyone has similar thoughts or related experiences, feel free to weigh in.

Not you.

Well, maybe you.

Actually, I was making the call to some higher power. Or directing the ether to send an eddy my way with one nice passion-filled, blockbuster idea that I can put some sweat equity into.

Like love, business ideas are all around us. Trouble is, like love, we have a tough time finding each other under compatible circumstances. And given that I’m no expert on love, the analogy now suddenly troubles me. But I digress.

I’m not sure that I need to say anymore. But if I might add one small qualification, let it be as powerful as something like eBay.

I sit patiently waiting…

I used to work for Graham Glass in late 2001 — but only for about three months. I was struck with one of his statements in my interview whereby he said code should be a work of art — it should be elegant.

I agreed then and I agree now.

Unfortunately, back in that time period, my mind was fairly scattered with a few other issues and I just wasn’t performing as I should have been. I had been through three companies within the past two years and had my confidence badly shaken. But that’s not what this post is about.

He would review my code and among the many changes and suggestions he would make, he would point out extra spaces or blank lines. I hadn’t realized that I was so inconsistent and basically careless. I learned and that stuck with me.

Now my code looks purposeful and consistent. EVERYTHING is thought out. Its a house with all its dishes put up (unlike mine currently). Its a house with books in shelves and not lying idly on a counter (unlike mine currently). Anyway, you get the point.

And so now I’ve gone native.

I now don’t really understand why everyone isn’t like that. As much time as we spend coding, we should all have our simple coding patterns under control. When I review code these days, I judge people based upon these little things. I don’t know if its quite fair, but if code is inconsistent, it rubs me completely the wrong way. It makes me question focus and one’s passion for their work.

In a recent experience, we had an “external” take on a project of moderate complexity that was pretty self-contained. We let him riff for weeks on end, but took no incremental checkpoints. Bad idea, by the way. And I take the blame for believing I was too busy to look in on the code. Anyway, when I finally checked it out, it was complete stream-of-consciousness programming! It was Jacob’s Ladder meets Vanilla Sky. It was as if he drunken-dialed in over the VPN!

The least offensive items were unused imports, parameters, and variables. Though I call those pretty offensive these days since our IDEs point those out for you these days. But beyond that, the logic was unbelievably scattered. Methods were long. Snippets of code were out of order. Exceptions were being eaten. I could go on.

So what did I do? I elbowed him off the project. That’s a weakness of mine. As Steve Macquire says in “Debugging the Development Process”, I flipped the bozo bit on him. And unfortunately, I’m complaining a lot because I’m now doing the development work that we’ve already paid for and are now late on.

My code? Well, of course, it reads like “The Da Vinci Code”. Well, perhaps maybe a little less intriguing…

Have you witnessed this phenomenon?

Phase I:
You perform well and are recognized as a dependable performer. Others, well, not so much. Consequently, you get all the challenging projects — sometimes two and three at a time. Others, sitting around while you work your ass off.

Phase II:
You harbor resentment at having to pull your weight and some of the weight of others. You get weary and disenchanted and you wonder what’s in it for you. Why not become one of them? And yet you are driven — you can’t become one of them.

Phase III:
You leave the company in search of an environment where you can work with others and grow. You crave a level playing field and a learning and inspiring organization.

Phase IV:
Sometime later, the phenomenon tips within your former company — the good people have left and the ones that remain are incapable and disinterested. Productivity declines. Work quality declines. Stock prices fall.

I have this feeling this is a very real anti-pattern. And I think I’m in Phase II.

Do I take the red pill or the blue pill?

I am struggling with yet another work dilemna — am I the biggest complainer lately or what?

Have you ever been asked to do something with full knowledge that that is the wrong thing to do? I’m in that situation right now. And we’re spending LOTS of dollars and euros to do it.

For example, we’re co-developing part of our web-based web registration process. My team is doing the backend, while the team elsewhere is doing the front-end. They have put into place some business rules that make no sense:

- Different customers can have the same e-mail address. And if they do, they must have a unique password in order to uniquely address them. Believe it or not, Amazon has this model.

- At login, they want to be sure they know that you are the one who REALLY has that e-mail address, so they want to scan the entire database for duplicates. All this in order to force you to update your information in the database so that THEY (we) can have an accurate address to send e-mail to.

I think the people who have conceived of these rules are so misdirected. What we want to do is make it easy and painless for our customers to register with us. Then once they do, they should be able to get in easily and without a wait. We want to be selfless for the most part to enhance their experience. As it is now, we selfishly impose our business rules and make them wait while we perform our housekeeping.

So, my opinion is that while the sponsors believe we are building a system that will net us more consumer registrations, in fact we are doing the opposite. My source of pain is that I have no channel to the sponsor to ask if they really know what they are doing.

Its stuff like this that makes it hard for me to bear to work the overtime necessary to meet a deadline. In my opinion, we are better off the longer that this stuff does not go online. Sad, but true.

My company, heretofore nameless, is moving to a modified outsourcing approach. I say “modified” because they are planning to buy deliverables instead of outsourcing complete projects. I am not completely sure what the motivation is for this new approach. And I’m not convinced that the right issues have been thought through.

I will freely volunteer that I miss the “good ole days” where I worked with a tight-knit group of similiar-minded and motivated performers. These days it seems like we’ve moved to augmenting staff where needed and in doing so not even bothering to ensure proper levels of competence. What I’ve experienced lately are dysfunctional teams that never gell — they never converge. And further, we disband the team and people go their separate ways after benefiting from the experience that we provided them.

The outsourced deliverable mode will be even worse. Now we will have to thoroughly define what we want, painstakingly keep tabs on the progress (not an altogether bad thing), and keep up constant communication to a group working offsite. To me, this adds a lot of “motion” to the project. And another set of communication paths — we all know what can happen with those, right?

So I wonder, if this is the right thing to do. Is it efficient? Does it save us money? Do we get what we pay for? What about those who must manage the process? Is this what we signed up for?

I personally am quite concerned about my role within the company. I like the engineering process and I like the team camaraderie. It appears that those aspects of my job are quickly fading into the past. But of course, I’d have to say they were only mildly present even in the early days of my career at this nameless company.

So what to do now? Clearly my niche in life is to participate in a team-oriented environment which builds an interesting system. In the past, I’ve found product-oriented companies to be the most fun, but unfortunately the least secure. I’ve also never had a good experience with the kind of work you get within an IT organization. However, they are the most secure. So I will be introspecting some in the coming days to see what changes I need to make to ensure that going to work is a pleasurable and rewarding experience.

Strange title, I admit and a long post as well. Patiently read and it may all make sense. If not, I apologize for the time-waste.

The e-mail arrived yesterday morning.

Due to poor company performance, my bonus will be at least 1.5% less than it could have been. Now, I’m not complaining about getting a bonus as its a privilege to have that kind of opportunity. However, I have continued to elevate my performance — so how should I feel about this?

I have a theory.

My organization probably models on the micro level what’s going on corporate-wide. In my two years, I haven’t seen much innovation or evolution. We do the same things in the same ways. You can suggest change, but you are more than likely on an island by yourself.

Further, people wander the halls like zombies. No one is inspired. Everyone is serving their time, collecting a paycheck, and enjoying a secure existence. There’s little accountability. And there’s little recognition for a job done elegantly. Its Ground Hog Day meets American Beauty without the roses.

So if my organization models the company, its no wonder that market share is falling.

So what can one person do at my low level do? Is there hope? I’m weighing a secure, but unfulfilling existence versus a risky, yet challenging existence. And as I weigh such things, I’m analyzing my company and seeking insight into why it is the way it is.

One of our curious corporate culture quirks is to synchronize project due dates with appraisal periods. Appraisal periods are synonymous with bonuses. As you might imagine, we generally make all of our project due dates. But in almost every case, what’s delivered is very different than what was requested. As the due date nears, there is a mad scramble to eliminate scope and find a way to deliver. In the most extreme cases, we spend loads of money and deliver very little incremental value. Its amazing. Its discouraging.

Its unbelievable also to watch the architectural and procedural short-cuts that are taken. I often leave work having pitched for the right thing to do, but made to agree with and build something that I know is not in the long-term interest of the company. People opt for local safety. They protect their bonus possibilities and screw the company.

So is there a better way?

Given my inability to think of a worse way, the answer must be emphatically “YES”. What I would love to do is to revamp our reward system and the way we organize and work. I don’t like having my bonus be dependent on a big system that I’m largely not in control of. Give me the freedom to achieve and I will. Incent me and make the game fair and I will perform.

So here’s my idea. Imagine if I could form a team of my peers and be allowed to work projects with this same team. We could more quickly reach those mythical CMM levels using many of the agility principles that we already practice. Before long, we’d know each other so well and work so well together that we’d surely outperform those teams that get thrown together. But that’s not all.

The corporation would define projects and assign an ROI to them. Obviously, the higher the ROI, the more challenging they are. And with greater ROI, more value to the business. Along with the ROI, assign a project bonus commensurate with the ROI. And draw up performance and delivery terms for the bonus. And then let teams like mine bid for them.

What do you think would happen here? If there was a project bootie up for grabs, I think we’d self-organize and be highly-motivated to deliver the project. I think we’d have our eye on the prize every day and it’d be like we were running our own business every day. I think some teams would distinguish themselves — maybe become dynasties. And maybe some of the perks could be better corporate facilities and perhaps a bit of rock-star-like fame in the company.

What do you think?

I’m reading two very different books right now. One is Sojourner: An Insider’s View of the Mars Pathfinder Mission and the other is DW: A Lifetime Going Around in Circles.

Folks, these are two very different books. One is about a very technical team seeking to find the right approach to build a rover that can withstand the trip to Mars and succeed once it gets there. The other is about a man with humble beginnings driven to succeed as a race car driver.

So what do they have in common?

Passion. Dedication. Teamwork.

These are things I think I’m lacking right now for my current job, so I’m seeking some inspiration from those who love can care about what they do. I want to regain that passion that makes you want to stay at work even though you don’t have to. That dedication that makes you want to continually improve on your design and be the best that you can possibly be. And I want to again remember what its like to have a single unified team that would run through a wall for each other.

I didn’t use to feel this way. I used to get all I could at work and come home and do my own midnight engineering. I can’t say that that was good for my personal life, but at least I had a purpose and a passion.

So my question is: is this typical once you’ve been in the workforce for nearly 20 years? And what is it like beyond those 20 years?