jamesladdcode.com

The title of this post comes from chapter twelve ‘The Trouble With Rules’ of the book Maverick! by Ricardo Semler which details the unusual but common sense approach to Business adopted by SEMCO.

SEMCO threw away the traditional Business structures and rules and were much better for it; they believe that “with a few exceptions, rules and regulations only serve to:

1. Divert attention from a company’s objectives.
2. Provide a false sense of security for executives.
3. Create work for bean counters.
4. Teach men to stone dinosaurs and start fires with sticks.

The desire for rules and the need for innovation are, I believe, incompatible. (Remember, Order or Progress.)  Rules freeze companies inside a glacier; innovation lets them ride sleighs over it.”  You may feel rules protect you but “a turtle may live for hundreds of years because it is protected by its shell, but it only moves forward when it sticks out its head.”

This common sense approach to Business may sound like heresy or lunacy to some, but a local innovative and progressive Australian company is trying a new approach based on learnings from SEMCO and other places. That company is Cogent Consulting.

At the Agile 2009 conference in August 2009, Steve Hayes from Cogent Consulting will hopefully be presenting Creating an Agile Company (link requires registration). The following is the synopsis of the proposed talk, and if you can make the conference and Steve is presenting then you will find Steve a really good presenter:

Many agile practitioners feel dissatisfied with traditional organisational structures. This report describes a consulting and development company created specifically for a group of experienced agile developers, and whose values and principles:

• Transparency
• Equality
• Flexibility
• Shared Rewards
• Get the Right People on the Bus
• Leverage time
• Maintain control

This experience report will cover the motivations that led to the formation of the company and the practices used day-to-day.

 Process/Mechanics

 Keynote presentation covering the following points:

• How traditional companies are anything but transparent
• The existence of alternative approaches - Semco, open book companies, Alfie Kohn (“Punished By Rewards”)
• Why you need to walk the walk, not just talk the talk
• How different people have different needs, financially and emotionally
• Why systems to reward people are part of your core business
• How we handle our money
• How we set salaries
• How we did staff reviews
• How we hire people
• The downsides of all this

 Learning outcomes

• Understanding how companies like this differ from more traditional companies
• Understanding of the motivation for creating a different sort of company
• Appreciating whether or not the company’s values and principles are consistent with agile values and principles
• New ideas on how to establish a company consistent with agile principles

At a recent Melbourne Extreme Programming User Group meeting the presenter Paul Monks mentioned the book “Getting to Yes, Negotiating an agreement without giving in” by Roger Fisher & William Ury & Bruce Patton.

Paul said the book helped a great deal in understanding how to negotiate to get Agile practices adopted at his place of work.

It’s rather hard to convince anybody of anything, so I thought the book must be magic.

I rushed out and bought a copy and sat down and read it and what follows is the five minute summary, however this isn’t a substitute for getting the book yourself as various examples in the book help understand the practices and how they are applied so consider this a quick reference.

Negotiation should:

• produce a wise agreement if agreement is possible.
• be efficient.
• improve or at least not damage the relationship.

A wise agreement:

• meets legitimate interests, to the extent possible.
• resolves conflicting interests fairly.
• is durable.
• takes community interests into account.

Positional bargaining produces an unwise agreement.

Basic elements for negotiating:

• people: separate the people from the position.
• interests: focus on interests, not positions.
• options: generate a variety of possibilities before deciding what to do.
• criteria: insist that the result be based on some objective standard.

Negotiators are people first. Always ask yourself “Am I paying enough attention to the people problem?”
Think in terms of perception, emotion and communication when dealing with the people problem.

Communication Problems:

• not really talking to each other.
• not really listening.
• misundestanding.

Invent Options and avoid the four major obsticles to inventing options:

• premature judgement.
• searching for a single answer.
• assumption of a fixed pie.
• thinking that solving their problem is the problem.

A little more detial for those who have time …

The Problem

Don’t Bargain Over Positions

• Arguing over positions produces unwise agreements.
• Arguing over positions is inefficient.
• Arguing over positions endangers an ongoing relationship.
• When there are many parties, positional bargaining is even worse.
• Being nice is no answer.

The Method

Separate the People from the Problem

• Negotiators are people first.
• Every nogotiator has two kinds of interests: in the substance and in the relationship.
• The relationshop tends to become entangled with the problem.
• Positional bargaining puts relationship and substance in conflict.

Separate the relationship from the substance; deal directly with the people problem.

Perception:

• Put yourself in their shoes.
• Don’t deduce their intentions from your fears.
• Don’t blame them for your problem.
• Discuss each other’s perceptions.
• Look for opportunities to act inconsistently with their perceptions.
• Give them a stake in the outcome by makeing sure they participate in the process.
• Face-saving: Make your proposals consistent with their values.

Emotion:

• First recognize and understand emotions, theirs and yours.
• Make emotions explicit and acknowledge them as legitimate.
• Allow the other side to let off steam.
• Don’t react to emotional outbursts.
• Use symbolic gestures.

Communication:

• Listen actively and acknowledge what is being said.
• Speak to understand.
• Speak about yourself, not about them.
• Speak for a purpose.

Prevention works best

• Build a working relationship.
• Face the problem, not the people.

Focus on Interests, Not Positions

For a wise decision reconcile interests, not positions.

• Interests define the problem.
• Behind opposed positions lie shared and compatible interests, as well as conflicting ones.

How do you identify interests?

• Ask “Why?”
• Ask “Why not?” Think about their choice.
• Realise that each side has multiple interests.
• The most powerful interest are basic human needs.
• Make a list.

Talking about interests

• Make your interests come alive.
• Acknowledge their interests as part of the problem.
• Put the problem before your answer.
• Look forward, not back.
• Be concrete but flexible.
• Be hard on the problem, soft on the people.

Invent Options for Mutual Gain

• Separate inventing options from deciding.
• Brainstorm options with both sides.
• Multiply options by shuttling between the specific and the general: The Circle Chart.
• Look through the eyes of different experts.
• Invent agreements of different strengths.
• Change the scope of a proposed agreement.
• Identify shared interests. There is no fixed pie.
• Dovetail differing interests.
• Ask for their preferences.

Make their decision easy

• Who’s shoes?
• What decision?
• What would you hope for?

Insist on Using Objective Criteria

• Deciding on the basis of will is costly.
• Principled negotiation produces wise agreements amicably and efficiently.

Developing Objective Criteria

• Fair standards.
• Fair procedures.

Negotiating with objective criteria

• Frame each issue as a joint search for objective criteria.
• Reason and be open to reason.
• Never yield to pressure.

For answers to questions like “What if they are more Powerful?”, “What if they won’t play?” and “What if they use dirty tricks?” you will have to read the book; I think you will be glad you did.

Herding Cats: A Primer for Programmers Who Lead Programmers, J. Hank Rainwater (Apress) is a must have book for anyone who has to manage or lead programmers. This book helps understand the psychology of Programmers allowing you to work more productively with them and create an environment where you can get the most out of them.

As you may have guessed I have an interest in Apple and have long thought their products were amazing, so it probably comes as no surprise that I have read iCon, Steve Jobs, The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business by Jeffrey S. Young and William L. Simon (Wiley).

The books was a roller-coaster for me, one moment thinking Jobs is awesome then Jobs is a tyrant and Jobs is childish but eventually leaving with the thought that Jobs is a human, a special human with quite a gift for design. I don’t think I’d like to work for him though. Worth a read.

I also read The Apple Way, 12 Management Lessons from the World’s Most Innovative Company, Jeffrey L. Cruikshank (McGrawHill) which was also a rollercoaster of the business ups and downs at Apple an what caused them. I came away thinking that the Apple ‘way‘ is to go 100% for design perfection in your products. See here for what design means.

The two books go hand-in-hand and I can’t suggest one over the other but I do suggest adding them and iWOZ to your reading list. I haven’t read iWOZ but I’m eager too after reading iCon.

The Wisdom of Crowds, Why the Many Are Smarter Than the few, by James Surowiecki

This is a fantastic book that I think should be on your must read list. Here are some quotes from the book.

“the simple fact of making a group diverse makes it better at problem solving.”

“grouping only smart people together doesn’t work that well because the smart people (whatever that means) tend to resemble each other in what they can do. If you think about intelligence as a kind of toolbox of skills, the list of skills that are “best” is relatively small, so that people who have them tend to be alike. This is normally a good thing, but it means that as a whole the group knows less than it otherwise might. Adding a few people who know less, but have different skills, actually improves the groups performance.”

“Ultimately, diversity contributes not just by adding different perspectives to the group but also by making it easier for individuals to say what they really think. As we’ll see in the next chapter, idepedance of opinion is both a crucial ingredient in collectively wise decisions and one of the hardest things to keep intact. Because diversity helps preserve independence, it’s hard to have a collectively wise group without it.”