Sher ki sawari - leading techies

In Hindi, there is a phrase "Sher ki sawari" that aptly describes what it takes to lead techies. Well, englisg translation would be "ride a lion". Brightest of techies are very fast in thinking and action. They are also deadly. Like a lion ride, you would enjoy the speed as long as u r riding, but you also know that once you get down, you would be the feast.

If you hire some of the best engineers, you have to prevent a situation where the lion stops running or you tame them to not be so ferocious. I think former is better, while later is practiced at most of places. What is required is that you be paranoid about lion stopping. That means you are constantly on toes thinking and acting to let the ride continue. One question that you should ask everyday is : What would prevent lion from stopping?

Here are few things that stop techies,

1. When there is nothing challenging?
2. When they don't feel that rewards are adequate?
3. They have burnt-down themselves.

What is the size of team one manager should handle?

A magic number of 11 is accepted in industry. This number, also called span is a balance between the overhead of having too many managers and the loss of focus on higher span. Well, here is my logic.

The rule 5(+-)2 says that it is difficult to remember more than 7 things. If one wants to retain focus on each team member, one has to honor this number. As a manager not only tasks, productivity but career paths of team members need to be managed. There are few more magic numbers that are industry accepted - 70% of your team will be rated standard, 20% high-flyers and 10% below average. If you want to focus on 7 team members, could ignore 1 that is below average and 2 will be self-driven, you can afford to have 10 people in the team.

But here is a bigger reason that you should give more thought to team size. Generally it is expected that you motivate your team members. That means giving each team member 15-30min per week. And this should be highest productivity time, not the end of day boring sessions. The energy you impart to your team in these sessions will go long way in maintaining a high productive team. On all five days of work you should begin the day by talking to a team member. To manage 10 people would mean two calendar weeks.

Organizational morale is like a bank account

New joiners increase the account balance by huge amount. Spontaneously the balance decreases slowly. Some self-motivated engineers also add to the account continuously or atleast decrease the rate of decay. But the biggest withdrawal is by bad leaders. Many times it happens that bad leaders take charge for a short period of time, make a withdrawal causing some short-term organizational benefit like productivity increase and are pushed up the hierarchy. It takes lot of time for organization to know what the effect had been on the bank account, because organizations do not explicit measure them. In the knowledge industry if there is one number that managers have to manage, it is this bank account balance.

If you need to manage it, you need to measure it. Not only organizations should measure it as frequently as possible, but managers should know the effect of their individual actions on the account. If task demands an employee spending a late night at work, how much would be the withdrawal. If I give a movie ticket to employee, how much would be the deposit. And these amounts are not constant over time.

If good happens somebody must have done, if bad happens how we prevent it!

This learning is the hallmark of leaders. Worded in many ways, this takes us away from blame game. High performing cultures are still built on blame game, or to put it in better words – accountability. Accountability is a very good term in forward looking sense and while looking backward when all good happened. It requires great clarity of thought and courage to avoid using accountability in a post-mortem meeting of failure. To keep the discussion focused on learning is known to many but practiced by so few that it needs to be repeated often. But this is only one half of what you want to focus on.

The other half is good. Whenever something good happens, we assume that team members know it and are already feeling great. This is true. But this is also a time when a feedback loop can be reinforced. If you wish to maintain a feedback loop, you need to make the loop stronger, so that it bears the cost of negative feedback that you may provide sometime. It is important to give positive feedback as often as possible. How do you know whether you are giving enough feedback? Well, if for every 1 negative feedback, you give 3 positive feedbacks to your best team members, then you are doing just ok.

But more important is that whenever something good happens, you must stop to think – who would have done that? And then reward those people.

Now some more theory on this. Attribution theory says that if things happen good people think it is because of them, but when bad happens they blame it on the system. So, by pointing out bad things and finding things to blame, people tend to tune off from the system. And that is not good.

So as a leader it is your job to look for good and find causes for it!

Recruitment : PSD

Lot can be said about recruitment and i don't have anything specific right now except for sharing some of the interesting perspectives.

Marc Andreessen co-author of mozilla, cofounder of netscape ... says you should hire more PSDs. That is, people who are POOR, SMART and a DESIRE”
(Do read the punch line "Often wrong, never in doubt.")

Surprise the mind ... always

You are a manager, engineer, salesperson ... whatever your profession, it is important to surprise the mind in your profession. For a salesperson, customer has to be surprised to grab the attention, for a manager the team has to be surprised to show the extra organization takes care of engineers, for engineer the peers and boss has to surprised to show extra talent the engineer brings to the table.

There is constant struggle between mind smoothening out the environment in its perception and you as a creator of environment un-smoothening it. You do new things to environment, mind notices it, stays surprised for sometime and then smoothens it out. Good news is that we are talking mind of humans, which do not have infinite history stored or used for smoothening. So, in a party you can surprise others by wearing a 1960 style dress.

But, why would one need to surprise minds? Let me focus the discussion to a manager in Software organization. Firstly, if as a manager you do not surprise people, you give a perception of incompetitiveness. The problem with this is that others will take on the role of surprising and later it will turn out that everybody would be doing little bit of everybody's role and one would lose execution.
Secondly, by suprising minds you go into permanent memory. Bigger bang for buck!
Thridly, engineers will copy you and you will see innovation in their area too.
And then "Law of Unintended Consequences" will take you higher in the hierarchy.

Well many managers know this, but few of them implement in India. The first step is to imitate what managers in US have learnt and take courageous steps to repeat it india. It is a good idea to leave it to engineers at times so that they get to chose how to have fun, but at times manager has to do what no engineer would have thought. Here are some of the ideas.

Take your team to massage therapy or some relaxation therapy (Mind Body and Soul).
Buy a outstation trip ticket for engineer.
Buy a ticket to movie for enginner and his/her spouse.
Book a cinema hall for team offsite.


More on brain ... http://www.youramazingbrain.org.uk/

Innovation: beyond initial phase

Most of new India development centers do good on innovation in first year. The new pair of eyes get adjusted to the environment and innovation dies. Most of the innovation is technology driven innovation. With less information about customers, customer driven innovation is rare. To go beyond "fresh pair of eyes" based innovation to more "disciplined" (conscious, regular) is a challenge.

Here is an article, "Key To High-Impact Innovation", that has few ideas on how to do it. Here are 4 principles mentioned there.

1• A clear challenge statement that expresses aspirations to a worthy goal without prescribing the means. This should be expressed in terms of a customer need, not a business need.

2• A well-designed, well-facilitated process that includes multidisciplinary participation and sources of cutting-edge ideas.

3• Emphasis on developing concepts that combine multiple elements of innovation (e.g., business model, IT platform, and channel) to increase impact and distinctiveness.

4• Techniques and structures that counterbalance the forces of risk aversion.


Here are some techniques to help with point 4.

Hold a high-stakes competition. In 1989, Mazda had two teams, one from the U.S. and one from Japan, compete to come up with a design for what was to become the Miata. This winner-take-all approach introduced a great amount of stress and unleashed the breakthrough thinking that resulted in one of the world's most popular sports car.

Fund exploration. Fluke Corp. creates new business opportunities through the use of "Phoenix teams," which are empowered to spend "$100k and 100 days," as they see fit, to develop and prototype a disruptive innovation. Senior executives have green-lighted enough projects to double Fluke's revenues in five years.

Remove the naysayers. Every organization has powerful people who immediately know three reasons why any new concept won't work. One company we studied simply removed two such execs from the leadership group that governs service innovation. The atmosphere changed immediately to focus on how to make unfamiliar concepts succeed.

Change your risk-analysis mindset. In lieu of a risk-adjusted return-on-investment approach, one company evaluates high-potential concepts by defining the worst-case outcome and asking the leadership team, "Can we survive it?" If the consensus is "yes," they charge ahead and work to make the successful outcome occur. This conversation often occurs at the board level.

Form a special petri-dish environment where new concepts can grow. Pitney Bowes (PBI) has a concept studio designed to explore opportunities far afield from its existing lines of business. IBM (IBM) has a similar unit, called "EBO" for Emerging Business Opportunities. This approach minimizes distraction to the ongoing business and permits concentration of special innovation skills. Successful projects are then sold back to the business units.