B- environment merits B- effort(37signals.com)
37signals.com
B- environment merits B- effort
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3461-b-environment-merits-b-effort
8 comments
Absolutely. It's just good statistics and systems thinking. In other words, "the truth."
See: W. Edwards Deming and his Key Principles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Key_principle... —I'm consistently dumbfounded why this systems thinking genius from over 50 years ago has not become prevalent or even decently respected in this modern world.
See: W. Edwards Deming and his Key Principles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Key_principle... —I'm consistently dumbfounded why this systems thinking genius from over 50 years ago has not become prevalent or even decently respected in this modern world.
Deming is both prevalent and respected. He acheived demi-god status in Japan, there are several channels of business shows dedicated to his work, and everyone, but everyone who writes a business book says the same as you...
He is like a hermit buying drinks at the bar while people talk:
- it is so sad that hermit is tucked away in his cave,
- ignored by everyone,
- no ice in mine thank you W.E.,
- Shame really
He is like a hermit buying drinks at the bar while people talk:
- it is so sad that hermit is tucked away in his cave,
- ignored by everyone,
- no ice in mine thank you W.E.,
- Shame really
Exactly. Very well respected and prevalent in certain circles, but outside that there's very little visibility.
His ideas would revolutionize American business, IMHO. But for some reason they seem incompatible with it at the same time...
His ideas would revolutionize American business, IMHO. But for some reason they seem incompatible with it at the same time...
Culture has a lot to do with it.
Does certain circles mean most business "thought leaders" for the past twenty years? I mean Tom peters was lamenting demmings low profile at the start of the US "quality" movement.
Demming was all about tight observe/act loops and planning for human frailty. These are not new concepts now, but like healthy eating and regular exercise everyone knows about it and yet businesses don't do it.
I would hardly say he is under recognised in the mainstream of business thought (I mean he never is going to compete with Brad Pitt for recognition status).
Demming was all about tight observe/act loops and planning for human frailty. These are not new concepts now, but like healthy eating and regular exercise everyone knows about it and yet businesses don't do it.
I would hardly say he is under recognised in the mainstream of business thought (I mean he never is going to compete with Brad Pitt for recognition status).
"like healthy eating and regular exercise everyone knows about it and yet businesses don't do it."
I think that's the meat of the problem—they're well-known and well understood ways to improve organizations, but they're difficult and against our nature. It's not that they're not respected at all, it's that they're largely not implemented, and I perceive that as a real lack of respect.
Let's put it this way: most managers and high-level executives I know of (and even ones I know personally) are very much all about blaming individuals and controlling companies through individual motivation, carrot-and-stick and hiring-and-firing. I think this is also a prevalent way of thinking in the business-school world, with very few schools teaching true statistics- and process-based management in the Deming style.
That is what I mean by lack of respect, and I stand by it: Deming has very little respect in the business world as a whole. His ideas brush up against everything stereotypical American MBA's believe to their core: that the individual is responsible for his own performance, that worker motivation comes from punishment and reward, and that fundamentally, it is individuals that drive success or failure of an organization, regardless of the system they work in.
In my opinion, now just speculating, I think this is deeply embedded in certain American Republican political and social ideologies: this idea that the individual is responsible for his own destiny and his own success, that there should be no safety nets and no dependence on outside influences. For many American executives, I think this is the prevalent way of thinking, and it's self-reinforced among the groups with which they associate. It's also severely at odds with Deming's ideas, and severely at odds with scientific facts (mathematical and social/psychological). But I won't get into that.
The sad part is that it extends to other areas of society as well; any place these ideologies infect the system. No Child Left Behind was fundamentally a way to seek out individual failure cases using pervasive testing and changed the entire system because of it. And it's done the same thing to the education system as it has been doing for quite some time to the corporate world. It sucked the life out of it and made it a social blame game with the wrong incentives, leading to the wrong results.
I think that's the meat of the problem—they're well-known and well understood ways to improve organizations, but they're difficult and against our nature. It's not that they're not respected at all, it's that they're largely not implemented, and I perceive that as a real lack of respect.
Let's put it this way: most managers and high-level executives I know of (and even ones I know personally) are very much all about blaming individuals and controlling companies through individual motivation, carrot-and-stick and hiring-and-firing. I think this is also a prevalent way of thinking in the business-school world, with very few schools teaching true statistics- and process-based management in the Deming style.
That is what I mean by lack of respect, and I stand by it: Deming has very little respect in the business world as a whole. His ideas brush up against everything stereotypical American MBA's believe to their core: that the individual is responsible for his own performance, that worker motivation comes from punishment and reward, and that fundamentally, it is individuals that drive success or failure of an organization, regardless of the system they work in.
In my opinion, now just speculating, I think this is deeply embedded in certain American Republican political and social ideologies: this idea that the individual is responsible for his own destiny and his own success, that there should be no safety nets and no dependence on outside influences. For many American executives, I think this is the prevalent way of thinking, and it's self-reinforced among the groups with which they associate. It's also severely at odds with Deming's ideas, and severely at odds with scientific facts (mathematical and social/psychological). But I won't get into that.
The sad part is that it extends to other areas of society as well; any place these ideologies infect the system. No Child Left Behind was fundamentally a way to seek out individual failure cases using pervasive testing and changed the entire system because of it. And it's done the same thing to the education system as it has been doing for quite some time to the corporate world. It sucked the life out of it and made it a social blame game with the wrong incentives, leading to the wrong results.
I see what you mean - yes, I think we can all benefit from honest measurements and systems thinking.
I have a glimmer of hope for you - the internal processs of a company today are opaque - deeply dependant on implicit knowledge and changing political patterns.
As we see technology replacing White collar workers, more of internal processes will be explicit, automated, coded. And so amenable to hooking up to simulations - at some point you can reliably simulate your internal company - and at that point you can experiment.
A/B test your internal processes and schumpter will allow deeming in through the back door
I have a glimmer of hope for you - the internal processs of a company today are opaque - deeply dependant on implicit knowledge and changing political patterns.
As we see technology replacing White collar workers, more of internal processes will be explicit, automated, coded. And so amenable to hooking up to simulations - at some point you can reliably simulate your internal company - and at that point you can experiment.
A/B test your internal processes and schumpter will allow deeming in through the back door
This is because they don't have a large enough group of outliers to matter.
So yeah, I wouldn't shape HR policy in a small company based on outliers.
But if i had a company of 50k people, i probably have at least 3500 significant outliers, performance wise.
So yeah, I wouldn't shape HR policy in a small company based on outliers.
But if i had a company of 50k people, i probably have at least 3500 significant outliers, performance wise.
I don't think he meant let those people hang around being disruptive. Just don't structure policy around them. If they are outliers in that respect, then will any policy you come up with make those people productive? Will it have overall positive benefit or will it damage the ability for the other 95% to work?
If you have 95% of your workforce who want to succeed and 5% of your workforce who are "slackers', you can provide tools to help those who want to succeed and fire the slackers. On the other hand, you can force through workflow policies that force the slackers to do minimal work while frustrating and slowing down the workflow of the rest of the staff who want to excel.
As well, the more freedom you give to those staff who want to excel, the more rope you give those staff who will not to hang themselves with. Force them to jump through hoops to show that they are working and they will do what they can to hide the fact that they're not. Give them free reign to slack off and they will not have false metrics to hide behind, nor will they feel the need to hide so much.
If you have 95% of your workforce who want to succeed and 5% of your workforce who are "slackers', you can provide tools to help those who want to succeed and fire the slackers. On the other hand, you can force through workflow policies that force the slackers to do minimal work while frustrating and slowing down the workflow of the rest of the staff who want to excel.
As well, the more freedom you give to those staff who want to excel, the more rope you give those staff who will not to hang themselves with. Force them to jump through hoops to show that they are working and they will do what they can to hide the fact that they're not. Give them free reign to slack off and they will not have false metrics to hide behind, nor will they feel the need to hide so much.
I agree you should fire the slackers.
But that is a policy, and you've focused on them and structured it around dealing with them, which goes against what he just said you should do :)
I think that he means do not do things like create a process that everyone must follow, full of red tape, simply because your worst employees cannot perform a task correctly.
And you should still not focus on them! That is a statistical fallacy.
Improve the system, and everything improves. Don't focus on outliers—they will always exist. You'll be killing individual ants when you really want to go after the queen.
Improve the system, and everything improves. Don't focus on outliers—they will always exist. You'll be killing individual ants when you really want to go after the queen.
This makes no sense.
Those outliers often cause greater than expected effect.
One slacker on a team of 10 people will often drag down the entire team.
Yes, you will always have below average people, statistically. That's pretty much irrelevant. You can still have a non-relative minimum performance bar. If people aren't meeting that, you need to deal with that, or else everyone suffers.
One slacker on a team of 10 people will often drag down the entire team.
Yes, you will always have below average people, statistically. That's pretty much irrelevant. You can still have a non-relative minimum performance bar. If people aren't meeting that, you need to deal with that, or else everyone suffers.
Sure, you can always deal with individual cases as they come up. You can't ignore that there are differences between the performance and fit of different employees. So hire and fire the best you can.
The key is what happens after that. You'll still have a rough bell curve of how people perform. You can keep chopping off the bottom of that bell curve, but the problem is that that practice is in itself demotivational. It's bad for culture, it's bad for your company. Basically it's negative reinforcement for all your employees, and the response to negative reinforcement is—to put it lightly—not optimal.
Your bell curve will be sucked backward by the firing black hole and people will start acting out of fear and individual motivations, which include: 1) not being fired, 2) keeping their job at all costs, and 3) looking better than everyone else. Rarely does the fear response motivate people to actually work harder. Instead it leads to a culture of in-fighting, blame, and ladder-climbing games. And in no part of this story are the overall goals of your company recognized, let alone respected or achieved.
This is why you don't concern yourself with the slackers. If they really are slacking and not getting anything done, you may fire them—no one is stopping you. But this is not your focus. Your focus should be on moving the entire bell curve up by 20%, motivating people to perform beyond their basic abilities, and empowering them to work. These are fluffy phrases, but they are also true. You start from the top down, make sure everyone understands the overall goals of the company, make sure they are well educated about the means and purpose of their work, and that they are enabled to work as well as they can. This is the essence of W. Edwards Deming's philosophy, and yes, it does work this way.
Because, more often than not, your "slacker" is not simply a bad person who can't work. Very few of those exist in reality. He is probably a person who has not learned the right things, encountered the right motivations, or understood the true purpose of his work, or he has confounding factors preventing him from reaching his true abilities (see Maslow's basic needs theory). Most people want their work to be meaningful, because people fundamentally want their lives to be meaningful.
This is what I'm saying: it's far more effective to improve the system surrounding your employees than to simply treat your employees as unaffected robots whose performance is static. Again, I'm not saying you can't fire people when they don't work: I'm just saying that it would be dumb to only focus on that strategy as though there were no other variables, and in fact, the system variables are the important ones when you actually look at it.
Best business advice of the last few hundred years:
"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea."
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
The key is what happens after that. You'll still have a rough bell curve of how people perform. You can keep chopping off the bottom of that bell curve, but the problem is that that practice is in itself demotivational. It's bad for culture, it's bad for your company. Basically it's negative reinforcement for all your employees, and the response to negative reinforcement is—to put it lightly—not optimal.
Your bell curve will be sucked backward by the firing black hole and people will start acting out of fear and individual motivations, which include: 1) not being fired, 2) keeping their job at all costs, and 3) looking better than everyone else. Rarely does the fear response motivate people to actually work harder. Instead it leads to a culture of in-fighting, blame, and ladder-climbing games. And in no part of this story are the overall goals of your company recognized, let alone respected or achieved.
This is why you don't concern yourself with the slackers. If they really are slacking and not getting anything done, you may fire them—no one is stopping you. But this is not your focus. Your focus should be on moving the entire bell curve up by 20%, motivating people to perform beyond their basic abilities, and empowering them to work. These are fluffy phrases, but they are also true. You start from the top down, make sure everyone understands the overall goals of the company, make sure they are well educated about the means and purpose of their work, and that they are enabled to work as well as they can. This is the essence of W. Edwards Deming's philosophy, and yes, it does work this way.
Because, more often than not, your "slacker" is not simply a bad person who can't work. Very few of those exist in reality. He is probably a person who has not learned the right things, encountered the right motivations, or understood the true purpose of his work, or he has confounding factors preventing him from reaching his true abilities (see Maslow's basic needs theory). Most people want their work to be meaningful, because people fundamentally want their lives to be meaningful.
This is what I'm saying: it's far more effective to improve the system surrounding your employees than to simply treat your employees as unaffected robots whose performance is static. Again, I'm not saying you can't fire people when they don't work: I'm just saying that it would be dumb to only focus on that strategy as though there were no other variables, and in fact, the system variables are the important ones when you actually look at it.
Best business advice of the last few hundred years:
"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea."
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
What does the size of the company matter? If 5% of the workforce in a 100 person company slacks off, vs 5% in a 50k person workforce, why is should policy be any different for the 50k workforce?
If you're implying the percentage of slackers scales non linearly as the size of a company grows then I'd love to see some research to back that up, as I'd be genuinely interested if that were the case.
If you're implying the percentage of slackers scales non linearly as the size of a company grows then I'd love to see some research to back that up, as I'd be genuinely interested if that were the case.
One possibility is that as the number of slackers grows, the amount of damage that they can do increases at a greater-than-arithmetic rate, particularly if they tend to cluster together.
For example, if 5% of a company overall is composed of slackers, but 25% of their customer support department are slackers, they may do outsized damage.
For example, if 5% of a company overall is composed of slackers, but 25% of their customer support department are slackers, they may do outsized damage.
So get rid of them. The trick is to get rid of them without enacting policy that negatively affects the morale of your productive workforce.
" Fundamentally, everyone wants to do a good job (the statistical outliers who do not follow this are not worth focusing policy on)"
You have just said you should focus a policy on getting rid of them. I agree with this, but it goes against what the article just said to do. I posit this is because he does not have a large enough company to have enough slackers that he needs to deal with them systematically, and instead can simply deal with them on a one-off basis.
You have just said you should focus a policy on getting rid of them. I agree with this, but it goes against what the article just said to do. I posit this is because he does not have a large enough company to have enough slackers that he needs to deal with them systematically, and instead can simply deal with them on a one-off basis.
Corporate policies can miss their targets. If a policy targeting the slackers existed, than part of it's job would be to target said slackers, which it would only be able to successfully do with some probability. However, if there isn't a statistically significant number of slackers, the policy could end up falsely targeting more hardworking employees than slackers. It's a classic probability/confusion matrix problem and goes to show that you have to be damn sure that your policy is only targeting the right people.
A company willing to risk harming its honest employees for minimal benefit is not one I would like to work for.
A company willing to risk harming its honest employees for minimal benefit is not one I would like to work for.
You seem to assume there isn't some minimum non-relative performance bar you can set for what "slacking" is, without harming hardworking employees.
Also, nobody said the policy had to be completely rigid, but having no policy will become a disaster as the company grows larger, and HR actually becomes significant.
Also, nobody said the policy had to be completely rigid, but having no policy will become a disaster as the company grows larger, and HR actually becomes significant.
Fair enough. But my experience tells me that large corporations + many policies = many missed targets.
Another 37signals post! Let's get started!
> If you want star quality effort, you need to provide a star quality environment. No, window dressing like a free meal is not it.
Boy, we've all been there. I know what he's talking about! Now I want to know what specific advice he has.
> It can serve as a cherry on top, but if the rest of the cake is full of shit, that’s not going to make it any more appealing.
Hahaha, now he's got me on the hook!
> Make people proud to work where they work by involving them in projects that matter and ignite a fire of urgency about your purpose. Find out who you are as a company and be the very best you. Give people a strategic plan that’s coherent and believable and then leave the bulk of the tactical implementation to their ingenuity.
Oh.
No specific advice. Free food isn't good enough, so... do some other stuff to get people excited. So this is another Chicken Soup for the Startup Soul post. Or maybe a more charitable interpretation, instead of just blowing hot air at us, he's asking us to blow hot air at employees?
> If you want star quality effort, you need to provide a star quality environment. No, window dressing like a free meal is not it.
Boy, we've all been there. I know what he's talking about! Now I want to know what specific advice he has.
> It can serve as a cherry on top, but if the rest of the cake is full of shit, that’s not going to make it any more appealing.
Hahaha, now he's got me on the hook!
> Make people proud to work where they work by involving them in projects that matter and ignite a fire of urgency about your purpose. Find out who you are as a company and be the very best you. Give people a strategic plan that’s coherent and believable and then leave the bulk of the tactical implementation to their ingenuity.
Oh.
No specific advice. Free food isn't good enough, so... do some other stuff to get people excited. So this is another Chicken Soup for the Startup Soul post. Or maybe a more charitable interpretation, instead of just blowing hot air at us, he's asking us to blow hot air at employees?
"Being a slacker is not an innate human quality"
I really can't swallow this. Laziness is /the/ primary motivator for invention. People want to do the least possible to attain their goals - this isn't a negative quality - but in the context of earning a paycheque it hurts the employer.
I've noticed the larger the company i've worked at, the more people treading water and hiding inbetween people who actually do work.
On the other hand I do broadly agree that window dressing is not enough. We end up judging employers by actions more than words by nature...
I really can't swallow this. Laziness is /the/ primary motivator for invention. People want to do the least possible to attain their goals - this isn't a negative quality - but in the context of earning a paycheque it hurts the employer.
I've noticed the larger the company i've worked at, the more people treading water and hiding inbetween people who actually do work.
On the other hand I do broadly agree that window dressing is not enough. We end up judging employers by actions more than words by nature...
Laziness does not have to equate to being a slacker. Lazily (or inventively) pursuing your employers goals is not a problem - generally if you find a way to satisfy them with less work, everyone's happy. Slacking would be following your own goals (loafing around, hiding) when they conflict with your employer.
As the article says, if your people aren't bothered or motivated by your goals, they probably shouldn't be there (at least in skilled positions - of course there are plenty of jobs which are purely for the paycheck). It's not worth changing your company based on the attitudes and motivations of people who shouldn't be there anyway.
It is easier to hide in (many) big companies, but that doesn't mean that the solution should be to remove all potential hiding places - it should be to remove (or re-motivate) those who are hiding.
As the article says, if your people aren't bothered or motivated by your goals, they probably shouldn't be there (at least in skilled positions - of course there are plenty of jobs which are purely for the paycheck). It's not worth changing your company based on the attitudes and motivations of people who shouldn't be there anyway.
It is easier to hide in (many) big companies, but that doesn't mean that the solution should be to remove all potential hiding places - it should be to remove (or re-motivate) those who are hiding.
While I certainly think a bad environment can make people perform worse, I'm not sure the reverse is true. There are just some people who don't give a shit regardless of the awesome trusting environment you give them.
He covers this point in the first paragraph, basically saying that they aren't worth your time. In short, fire them.
"If you’re doing work in a less than star environment, you owe less than star effort. Quid pro quo."
This describes every bad job I've ever had. You do a great job, nobody cares, you do a mediocre job, you feel bad. Lose lose.
This describes every bad job I've ever had. You do a great job, nobody cares, you do a mediocre job, you feel bad. Lose lose.
DHH leaves professionalism and personal pride out of his analogy.
I try to do good work even for bad employers. Instead of reducing the quality of my work product, what I would do is quit and find a better employer.
I try to do good work even for bad employers. Instead of reducing the quality of my work product, what I would do is quit and find a better employer.
"It can serve as a cherry on top, but if the rest of the cake is full of shit, that’s not going to make it any more appealing." Got to love that
Reminds me of a lot of shitty start-ups out there - where management is terrible but thinks it can bribe people into sweatshop-style labor with meaningless perks.
I used to do freelance work in a big open office setup with a lot of different companies all owned by the same big holding company. Once or twice a week one of the partners of the parent company would come in with a box of brownies or some such thing. The startup kids who hadn't paid themselves in months would all stand around eating the treat, saying "god, this is the best place to work."
If you can afford not to get paid for months...
I've got that kind of mind that can drift off while reading. By the time I had regained my focus, the article had descended into this:
"If you’re doing work in a less than star environment,
you owe less than star effort. Quid pro quo. By all
means, do yours to affect and change the environment.
Nudge it towards the stars. But also, accept the
limitations of your power. You can drag a horse to the
water, but you can’t make it drink.
So ration your will and determination. Invest what’s
left over, after meeting the bar of your work
environment, in your own projects, skills, and future.
The dividends is what’s going to lead you to the next,
better thing.
Everyone deserves to work at a place that inspires them
to give their very best. Don’t stop reaching until you
have that."
Once you earn the spot of a visionary with an audience, you have to continue to espouse ideas. Movements require that ideas be constantly re-framed to draw more and more people into the fold. Also, you must reinforce the same ideas for the existing audience.
If you're beyond the need to receive the "milk of the gospel" and are ready for the meat, then its probably time for you to be a producer and not merely a consumer. But, don't blame the minister for continuing to feed the babes.
If you're beyond the need to receive the "milk of the gospel" and are ready for the meat, then its probably time for you to be a producer and not merely a consumer. But, don't blame the minister for continuing to feed the babes.
That is exceptionally deep, my friend.
The 37 Signals blog posts on here every week all like this one make me not want to work there.
Personally I was hoping for something a little more mathematical, since I was re-reading Melvin Conway's: How Committee's Invent yesterday and came to expect a heuristic for efficiency versus organizational style.
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Looks like DHH is channeling his inner Sancho Panza.
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This is a great idea that 37signals keeps coming back to, i.e. don't shape HR policies based on outliners and exceptions.