Recently, I spoke with 300 smart and passionate Microsoft (MSFT) employees. Are you as open to change as they are? If yes, read on. I was invited to your company because of my book, The Year Without Pants, which tells my story as a former Microsoft manager who worked for a year at the eighth most popular website in the U.S.: WordPress.com, which is more popular than any Microsoft website, including Bing. These two companies are very different, yet one is on the rise and one is not. As a unique traveler between both cultures, here’s my advice:
It was a hard article to write, given how much history I have with the company. They asked me to take an angle that focused on WordPress.com, which forced me to leave out many stories and insights that came simply from working there for a decade and seeing what’s happened since I left. If anyone’s interested, happy to share more thoughts, just ask.
There’s a good article detailing the death of Microsoft Courier, a tablet device project from 2009/10 led by J. Allard, of XBOX fame. The core story rests on this observation:
Within a few weeks, Courier was cancelled because the product didn’t clearly align with the company’s Windows and Office franchises, according to sources. A few months after that, both Allard and Bach announced plans to leave Microsoft, though both executives have said their decisions to move on were unrelated to the Courier cancellation.
Most interesting products for today’s world can not easily align with business models created in 1995. I know many smart people who had great prototypes for new products while at Microsoft, who were saddened to learn the escape velocity of a project is, at minimum, greater than the gravity of its two largest businesses (Office & Windows). They’d watch with sad eyes as their well conceived plans were smashed to pieces against the massively successful, but ultimately boring, twin leviathans of Microsoft. The details of the Courier story, a well designed product, fully staffed with 100+ creative employees, is sad indeed. A very different future for Microsoft was ready to born, but never saw the light of day (photos and demos).
During the browser wars, a similar, but rarely told, story explains why IE4 was the pinnacle of browser innovation in 1997, and then took a right turn into stagnation.
Brad Silverberg, VP of internet things circa 1997, intended for the web to replace Windows. He wanted Microsoft to make the web a platform, and launched versions of IE on Mac and IE on Unix (to the dismay of the industry. It’s the only UNIX application Microsoft has released). The idea was to leave OS’es behind, and focus on the web as the core way people will interact with computers. A prophetically Googlean strategy.
But when it came time for Gates to make the call, Jim Alchin, the VP of Windows, won. Windows was more important. As a result, after IE4 (and the implosion of Netscape), plans for making the web the future platform for the company were shut down, in favor of protecting the Windows franchise.
Many lament these choices. It seems boring to continually protect the status quo. But when your status quo generates $60 billion annually, a rate of income only a handful of companies in history have achieved, few complainers would have the courage to act differently if they were in charge.
I’d occasionally get asked what I thought of Ray Ozzie at Microsoft. I’d say this “Great guy, a worthy legend, but he’ll have little effect”. Why? They’d ask.
And I’d say: “because he’s not a VP for an actual product.”
You can’t lead in the abstract. You have to get skin in the game. Today MSFT announced he’s leaving and I’m not surprised.
In the past I’ve criticized on idea of job titles like VP of Innovation or Chief Innovation officer. Chief Software Architect, Ozzie’s title, had similiar problems. It means little to those with real power inside a company. Makers of things, like developers, give the most respect to people who ship things. What does a VP of Innovation ship? What does a Chief Software Architect ship? Nothing. Slide decks and vision plans don’t compile. You can prototype and speculate all you want, but that’s at best indirect influence on what the rest of a company is doing. You can’t be a leader from the sideline. Give advice? sure. Make demos? Absolutely. But if a real risk needs to be taken you are not the person with the power to take it.
We’d have to ask people across MSFT if Ozzie had an impact on them. As an outsider, I can’t say with any certainty if he did or he didn’t.
But I know for progress to happen you must get in the middle (or be the leader of the thing that is in the middle). I don’t know if Ozzie was offered ownership of a product or division and said no, or if that was never in the cards from Ballmer. Either way, the fate was set early on as it is whenever a high profile outsider does a tour at a company (Bill Buxton, and others at Microsoft Research, come to mind). You can earn your salary and have value, absolutely, but if you are not a key person on a key project, less can be expected of your net impact on a company as a whole.
For the industry I’m happy to see Ozzie leave – I’d have been happier to see him as CEO, or VP of a product, at MSFT, that would have been fascinating to watch – but since he’s leaving my bet is he will take full charge of some new thing and that will be the best for all concerned. I look forward to what comes next Mr. Ozzie.
I’m a fan of things going wrong. It’s only when things go wrong that anyone pays attention enough to really learn something, or get the courage to try something new.
Recently there were two high profile failures, at two Fortune 500 tech companies. Microsoft’s failed cell-phone Kin, and Google’s hard to define Wave. I thought it’d be fun to compare and distill some lessons.
Change requires a champion: Kin is one in a long line of failures for the mobile space for Microsoft. Although it was formed by a different group, and led with a different vision, it was canceled a shocking handful of weeks after its release. This generally signifies senior management failure: a rule of thumb is either can it before it launches, or give it the runway it needs to succeed. To kill a product after 40 days signifies several layers of mistakes or a (poorly timed/surprise) changing of the guard. The exit of VPs J. Allard and Robbie Bach, seems like a link in the story. Allard is the story behind XBOX, one of Microsoft’s best stories around innovation.
Google Wave was weird, but cheap. Compared to Kin, which likely involved dozens of people and man-months, Wave was likely done by a small team of people. That was their biggest cost! If you’re going to have failures, even visible ones, better cheap and small, that expensive and large.
As a rule, any software in this century that reinvents the scroll bar deserves to fail. Sure, there might be a better design, but what do you gain in putting your neck out for it? There’s just no reason to place a bet, even a side bet, on a scroll bar and perhaps that’s it – wave was just weird. It was interesting, but often in the wrong ways. Whatever goodness might have lurked inside, it was hidden inside an onion of seemingly odd choices that required a lot of explaining. And it was slow too. Weird and slow negates most other kinds of goodness because few people will stick around long enough to experience them.
However the fact that Wave stayed out in the wild longer than Kin means the team that made it got a chance to learn tons. This is awesome. This is smart. They got to be involved in a live, mass market, real time experiment in trying to do whatever it was they were trying to do. For them, Wave is far from a failure. It was one of the best learning experiences they might ever have.
The Kin team however, having had the runway pulled out from under them, likely learned nothing. They’re probably bitter about all of the concept sacrifices they had to make to get it out the door, and likely blame those sacrifices for why it was as poorly received as it was.
But worse, I suspect there won’t even be a postmortem written for the team, or the company. The lessons of Kin will likely die with Kin, instead of being shared openly so everyone learns from the multitude of experiences the smart people on the project had.
An easy metric of innovation culture is learning – are people at all levels learning, sharing and growing from whatever happens, good or bad. Not lip-service. But actual learning, where people admit their own mistakes or oversights and what they themselves might have done differently (rather than the witch-hunt many big companies confuse with learning).
This starts with the leaders, and the leaders on Kin or Wave have much fodder to work with. Are they going to share what they learned? Progress awaits if they do. But resentment, confusion and high odds for the same mistakes being made again will fester if they don’t.
Anywhere that people learn from success and failure will outpace places that lack the courage to look at failures with their eyes open and learn from it, as well as places that don’t learn anything at all.
I see people debate this all over the tech sector, and in tech/web groups in other companies. Even back at Microsoft, we used to argue about this all the time, especially whether program managers (e.g. small team level project managers) should know how to code or not. Sadly, no one ever researched whether it had any bearing on their success or not in this role.
In short, it depends on what you are managing.
If you are A) exclusively a manager of software developers, then yes, you should probably still know how to code and have a programming background. But only a small percentage of your working day (5-20%) should be spent writing code. The larger your team, the smaller this number should be. Once you are the boss, your primary job is to do all the things that individual programmers can not do. To fight the political battles no one else on your team can fight. Champion new initiatives or directions. Resolve ugly conflicts. Coach. Arrange for training, budget, skill development and recruiting, so the team continues to grow and get better. Managers who are former programmers are notorious for continuing to be good at programming and entirely sucking and neglecting just about every other task good managers do. The tech sector is filled with these people. It’s sad. In many cases they’d be better off with the kind of people who end up as B.
If you are B) your management role is more general, say a project manager or a team lead, but you do have programmers working with or for you, then knowing how to code is less important. You probably have a background in business, or marketing, or have worn many different hats in your career. What is important are the following:
Do you have their trust? And do you trust them? It matters less how you get it, but put simply, do programmers trust you? This can be true or not regardless of how much you know about coding. If you protect your programmers, help them to be effective, keep them out of boring meetings and other forms of stupidity, then you’ll have their trust. And with trust they will be a partner and an ally, and work with you to get the best out of each other regardless of how much you know or don’t know. Oddly, it’s calling bullshit, or to be less confrontational, asking good, smart, tough questions that demonstrate you not only understand, but you care, that often earns trust. On the other side, leaders have to extend trust first and resist the tendency to micromanage what you don’t understand. Leaving programmers alone with crystal clear goals and deadlines they’ve collaborated on can be a surprisingly effective management style.
Can you call bullshit? Part of the conversation with every employee is sorting out whether what they say is hard is a) actually hard b) they are ignorant of how to make it easier or c) it’s just something they don’t want to do. A good leader has have enough understanding of tradeoffs and how software works to ask tough questions and, now and then, call someones bluff.
Do you understand morale? There is more to morale than morale events. Someone has to understand what motivates the programming team. What gets them excited and what makes them depressed. I can know more about programming then the 100 programmers working for me, but if I ignore their feelings about their work, never inspire them, or help them understand why the work we do matters, what good is that programming knowledge? Its worthless. A leader who can understand, motivate, inspire, convince, or in some cases merely make people laugh, makes a special contribution no one else can likely make.
Do you understand coding concepts? There could easily be a “programming for managers” short course. There are meta concepts that matter: performance, objects, the problems of specifications, APIs, basics of testing, etc. that don’t require hard core programming skills to understand. Even just having some exposure to working in HTML/CSS, Flash, Excel macros, anything, if taught in the right way, can yield a sense of the concepts involved, and those concepts are what matters. You don’t need to be a geek to speak and understand geek.
Can you help programmers make good decisions? Good decision making is good decision making. Any good leader (e.g. a president, executive or parent) is often in situations where they are not the expert, but where they have to work with experts who know much more about something. There is a skill, a communication and thinking skill, for how to maximize the utility of an expert in making a decision. Simply asking a programmer two questions: 1) What are our 3 or 4 alternatives here? 2) What are the tradeoffs between them? frames the conversation so that good decisions are likely to surface just through conversation. Even in listening to the programmer explain the differences forces the programmer to think better about the decision, and simultaneously informs the leader on the context, tradeoffs, and risks that matter without forcing them to become experts themselves. Managers don’t need to be experts – they need to be great at getting functional value out of experts of any kind. Another word for this is facilitation, but people rarely like to admit that the secret of good leadership hinges on a touchy-feely communication word like facilitation.
Can you let programmers help you make good decisions? As is often the case, this is reciprocal. Are you capable of taking ideas on design, marketing, or management from the programming team? Just as you have insight into what programmers should be doing, programmers have insight into what you are doing. Another quick way to build trust is to let them see that if they give you feedback or a suggestion and you make use of it, they’ll know you have their ear and treat you differently for it.
Can you represent their work well to others. The other functional task leaders have is reporting on, or showing work the team has done to people not on the team. This likely involves being asked technical questions, and the leader has to be able to represent some percentage of these questions and challenges well from a technical perspective. Typically if a leader is truly involved in the decisions, and understands the tradeoffs, they’ll be able to answer many of the questions about the work. But if they can’t, and must always be surrounded by a crew of programmers to prevent being embarrassed, then they’re not as useful to the team as they should be.
Conclusion: There are so many different kinds of teams and projects where my advice might be different, but on average I’m convinced someone of type B, who can’t code but meets most of the criteria above, will have better results than someone who can code, but meets less of the criteria I listed above.
Disclaimer: Of course there is nothing mutually exclusive between being a great programmer and being a great manager. These people exist. But they’re rare (How many have you met in your career?)
It shows the quarterly operating expenses for Microsoft’s Online division. This last quarter, Microsoft lost $466 million. That’s 3 months.
Over the last year (4 quarters) Microsoft has lost nearly $2 billion.
And from what I remember, you’d see losses for the period before what’s shown on the chart, as the division has always struggled with profitability.
It’s an unbelievable chart. I’ve had to stop writing several times just to look at it again.
I’m not arrogant enough to claim I can fix an entire division. But I can ask some questions:
Who in senior leadership has earned promotions or raises during this time? I’m not saying this is impossible, but it does deserve some serious explaining.
What fundamental assumptions are at work here that someone is still protecting?
How would things be different if this division were operating as it’s own company? Clearly whatever leverage and resources it’s getting from the rest of Microsoft hasn’t been of use to the bottom line. If it were it’s own company one of two things would have happened by now: 1) It’d be out of business or 2) It’d be doing things very differently.
What are the counter examples in this division that are profitable? And are their other groups rallying around their success and trying to learn/leverage/borrow from them?
In the last 50 years how many corporations have run entire divisions with this level of operating loss over four years or more? And what was the outcome?
If history is a judge, Steve Sinofsky, the VP from Office who took charge of Windows 7, might be the only weapon Microsoft can use to tackle Online. Other VPs have been in charge, including David Cole who was my VP for a time in the IE days. But they’ve been ineffective at things other than spending lots of money.
In spirit of my last post (Microsoft and Creative Destruction), the better question is what did Sinofsky do to the Windows team to turn Vista into Windows 7? Why isn’t there a case study on this, that’s stapled onto the forehead of every manager until it’s read? And how can that be emulated in the Online division? My suspicion is this case study has not been done, and if it has, it’s either not being shared widely or it’s being ignored.
A recent NYT article by former Microsoft VP Dick Brass has caused quite the stir, but for the wrong reasons. Every follow up article I’ve read, including one from Microsoft, gets much of it wrong some key things wrong.
The premise: The core point of the Brass article is how the introduction of middle management and bureaucracy has killed innovation at Microsoft.
My counterargument: Microsoft has always been a conservative, platforms company. Visionary design and creative leaders think in terms of great products, which Microsoft has never been good at. Brass assumes the challenges that hampered Tablet PC were new and local, but they have always been there. Microsoft’s best, and most creative, work has come when a competitor forced one of the few Renaissance-VPs (VPs who were not over-promoted engineers but actually had a diversity of management skills) to take product design seriously.
My credentials: I worked at MSFT 1994 to 2003. I was on the IE 1.0 to IE 5.0 team among others (Windows, MSN, and MSTE/Best Practices, where I worked with many groups across the company). I wrote a bestselling book about Innovation and I’ve spoken and consulted with various groups at the company dozens of times since I left in 2003.
My take:
The primary problem at Microsoft regarding good design & innovation is the diffusion of creative authority. The problem is not the numbers of people at the company, or the layers of management, as many gripe about. Layers don’t help, but it’s not the problem. The real issue is the inability to grant creative authority to the few people worthy of it. Microsoft has always been a place that gives way too many people a say in matters of design, vision and user experience, and it shows in the pervasive mediocrity of the majority of its products. Films need directors. Orchestras need conductors. But if you divide things into 30 pieces and ask 30 people to play creative visionary, mediocrity ensues. The better products at Microsoft are the ones where VPs modify the distribution of authority to create clear creative authority.
Few VPs are qualified to be creative leaders, at Microsoft or elsewhere. And there is no creative lead role at Microsoft. There never has been. This is not new, it has always been true (at least since 1994 when I started). This is why when brilliant, genius type software designers come to the company, they are baffled by how little creative power they can earn, so they retreat to research or future thinking groups that have no skin in the game (e.g. Bill Buxton, Steve Capps, Ray Ozzie, Jim Gray (RIP), etc.). Microsoft is simply a hard place for to accumulate wide authority over design, which is required to make coherent visions, user experiences and innovations come true. Worse, it’s rare for leaders to acknowledge death by too many cooks since those who have never worked elsewhere, and have no conception of creative process, can’t imagine any other way. The culture has always been a heavily consensus/collaboration driven place for managers, which waters down ideas, and shifts what goes out the door heavily towards conservation.
Management at Microsoft is fat with inbred managers who are not worthy of their title, but this has always been true. If you are hired to manage version 5 of something, you inherit a host of decisions made with skills you do not have, yet get credit for anyway. If the team you inherit does good work, and you happen to be the manager, you receive credit, regardless of how little you did. Entire unprofitable, failed divisions, funded by the rest of the company, promote people out of corporate obligation, creating the existence of middle managers who have never actually successfully managed anything in the marketplace. For the 90s, this was MSN and Consumer products, which were perennial failures. The quality pool of people who managed in those divisions was below average and as the company aged more of these groups were born. Microsoft, like all companies, has suffered from the Peter principle, or worse, perhaps the Paul Principle (people who are lousy at even simple management skills but inherit mediocre projects they don’t understand, and simply manage not to get fired via their team’s noble but unheralded efforts, which hide their shortcomings). As a result, there are line level managers at Microsoft who are more competent than some middle or senior managers. But this has always been true, given the diversity of the company. It’s worse now because of the size.
Real layoffs would be a blessing. In 1999 when I left the Internet Explorer team (before the ill-fated IE 6.0 release), I looked around the company for other teams to work on. I couldn’t believe how many lost, misguided, sad, self-destructive teams I saw. This was in 1999! The company has more than tripled in size since then. Mini-Microsoft is so clearly on the mark about his core ambitions. I don’t wish unemployment on anyone, but I’d say a) the ratio of managers to programmers is insanely out of whack b) The number of projects and divisions that have never made profit and are market laggards is obscene. If the company were split apart, few groups are competent enough to survive a year. This defeats the “strategic value” these properties supposedly have, as dumping of buckets of money earned by Office and Windows profits into their bonfires of incompetence does not a strategy make. You need basic leadership competence, which all too many groups at Microsoft don’t have (and many never did).
Microsoft’s best and most inventive work has often been driven by competition. A visible and serious threat is the only situation where leadership, historically, was forced to be creatively aggressive, giving a chance for creatives to obtain enough power to do good work. Windows 95, Office 95, Internet Explorer 5.0, MS Natural Keyboard, XBOX 360 were all excellent products by most standards, and were made possible by strong competition. The question executives need to ask is why divisions like Mobile & MSN,or the entire Vietnam like 15 year history of imploding efforts of web search (there is a great book to be written by someone about this), have been disasters despite clear and strong competition – this is the analysis to post on every office door at the rest of the company. If you want Office or Windows to change more, wait for more successful threats to these profit streams.
It’s lazy arguing to assume an organization of 10,000 or 100,000 is uniform in any way. Groups at Microsoft have a different culture, and some have been wildly more successful than others (e.g. Office vs. MSN/Live/whatever it’s called this week) in part because their leaders have developed superior cultures that diverge widely from other groups. Windows 7 is an excellent product no matter how it stands in comparison to Apple’s work, and the turnaround from Windows Vista, which many heralded as the end of MSFT, was beyond noteworthy. If Windows 7 or XBOX 360 is made in the same company that makes all the products you hate, you have to realize the limits of painting broad strokes. This is where many critiques of Microsoft fall short, including the one by Brass. They assume uniformity, projecting a local set of experiences in part of the company as the model for the entire company.
If you talk only to people who quit and were disgruntled you can’t possibly have the whole story. I’ve never met Dick Brass, but I know the Tablet PC was a commercial failure. As smart as Dick is, its likely he never understood how IE beat Netscape (it was more than the monopoly stuff), or Office beat Lotus/WordPerfect etc. He also might not know the long history of Windows and Office rejecting most requests from most other teams as a matter of both basic sanity and arrogance. Specific to Tablet PC, it started as a Bill Gates pet project. Working with Bill, who Dick curiously never mentions, was no treat, and unlike Steve Jobs, his direct involvement in matters of design is likely not a godsend. Articles like this one reads too much into corporate policies, as many of them are old (e.g. the review process) and good managers have always had ways to work within these rules to reward good employees. I’d agree the processes could be improved, but all the good VPs find ways to bend rules into loopholes.
The greatest disease at Microsoft is lack of sharing lessons from failure, especially where innovation is concerned. Microsoft has made many big, visible bets. Many of them have failed, but that’s par for the course. The problem is these expensive lessons are swept under the rug, encouraging others in the company to repeat the same mistakes. Everyone loves to make fun of Microsoft Bob, but few can articulate why it failed. If you don’t understand why it failed, you don’t have any reason for laughing so hard, and you likely aren’t half as smart as you think you are. A case study on Vista, MSN Search, Microsoft Bob, The Tablet PC, etc. should be produced by an outside consultant, and stapled on the forehead of every manager at the company, once a day, until they read them all word for word. Then they’d take advantage of Microsoft’s so called experience and wisdom. Otherwise, they are being set up to make the same expensive mistakes again and again.
The idea of Innovation, and Innovation Systems, is a distraction. Success in the market is a better scorecard and the most reliable source of criticism. Innovation, as the word is used in these articles, is a matter of taste. You can be very inventive and still get your ass kicked. Or do a great job with mostly conventional ideas, and kick more interesting competitors off the field. Apple, if you study their choices, doesn’t pull things out of the sky (digital music players, cell phones, and tablet PCs were all established ideas). They enter games others are already playing and kick their ass. But innovation is the least useful lens. The best criticism of Microsoft’s management is how, or how not, they’ve done against their competitors in terms of customer satisfaction. If innovation matters as much as people seem to claim it does, it’s well reflected in either market success or customer satisfaction, so worry more about those solid measures, rather than the ethereal notion of who is innovative and who isn’t.
One common criticism, often mild, I hear about my book Making Things happen is it’s a Microsoft flavored book. I plead guilty. But this wasn’t for philosophical reasons, which some people seem to assume. My goal wasn’t to spread to the world how Microsoft makes software (which had already been done by Microsoft Secrets). Instead it was to use what I’d learned shipping IE 1.0 to 5.0 and other products to illustrate concepts, tactics and tricks that can apply to any kind of project whether they use similar processes or not. I needed a spine and that was one I knew well and had the most stories working with. For better or worse, Microsoft is an excellent reference point for how software, or any product is made, for a variety of reasons. But that’s all I meant it for - a system to use as leverage to explore the important stuff, not the other way around.
One of my top gripes at the time was how most project management books seemed written by consultants, people who didn’t write as if they’d actually used what they are teaching themselves (Mythical man month, for all it’s charms, is guilty of this in parts), since they couldn’t point out the common traps of their advice. The best remedy seemed to be specific, be real, tell the truth, and thus, the book came out as it did. I was, and still am, a believer in the idea of program managers, or project managers as true team leaders, and I wanted to tell the story of project management from that point of view.
In fact, if ever I write another project management book I doubt I’d even mention some of the heavier duty process stuff that shows up, however briefly, in the book. MRDs, vision documents, etc. are, as some critics pointed out, artifacts of larger organizations and many wonât have to wrestle with them, which is probably a good thing.
I’m a big believer it’s the soft skills that matter much more, and when I look back at Making things happen I see what could have been two separate books. One about process-y stuff (chapters on vision, specs, etc.) , and another about the human elements of leading projects (leadership, communication, relationships, crisis, risk, politics). I suspect people who like the book have a strong preference for one or the other. In flipping through the book it does seem to hold up the promise in the preface, that you can skip boring chapters and get value from the next - perhaps I suspected there were two books in there when I wrote it.
Anyway, its been years now and I donâ’t think I ever posted about this, despite how often I’ve seen it surface in reviews or had it come up at lectures.
Microsoft recently announced the end of the product known as Encarata. Way back in the day Encarta was cool. It was one of the few things made in the CD-ROM era that, looking backwards, made sense (Yes, I owned a copy of both Art Gallery and Microsoft Dogs, and as idiotic as it seems now, the later actually got good reviews) – and was actually designed quite well.
It’ was also a curiously successful work of innovation by Microsoft on several counts. Few people remember, but Microsoft bet big on CD-ROMs and consumer software, and of those efforts, many of which flopped, Encarta was a gem. In 1994 it demonstrated many of the things people had been promising PCs would be good for (multimedia, education, instant access to information, etc.). There were other encyclopedias, but (I don’t think) anyone else invested as much in the design and technology as Microsoft did.
Many forget, or were still in diapers, but in 1994, years before web design would be something you could say at a bar without people thinking you were into spiders, Encarta demonstrated much of what we call information architecture, interaction design and consumer aesthetics, all in one high profile consumer product. Many, many companies and software teams used Encarta as a reference for not only what was possible, but for what a good experience should be like. Microsoft didn’t invent many of the technologies involved, but the encapsulation of so many into a well designed experience is similar in some ways to the success of the i-pod. Both are examples of innovation through superior user experience and integration of various technologies made mostly by other folks.
And most importantly, when Netscape and Internet Explorer began the browser wars, many of us looked at Encarta as an approximation of what a great web experience should feel like, with rich media, consumer appliance simplicity, and great search and navigation. In the hallways on the Internet Explorer team we had screenshots of some of the Encarta team’s work, among various other bits of software inspiration, up on the wall. It was definitely a reference used in designing features like Explorer bars, Favorites & History.
Kudos to Bill Flora, Adrienne Odonnell, and Sheila Carter (who are listed here as the design team) and other folks who worked on this thing over the years.
Encarta also was one of the best product names Microsoft has ever had. Sure, that’s not saying much given how notorious MSFT is for lousy names, but like Excel (also a good name, at least it was in 1985, compared to Lotus 1-2-3) it somehow fit the vibe of the kind of thing the product was.
Can’t say I miss loading CDs into my PC (I can’t remember the last time I did that), but Encarta definitely deserves a notable place in the history of software design. They helped raise a bar many people still use today.
I remember the day I started working as a program manager on the Internet explorer team. On my second day, Joe Belfiore, my boss, came to my office, closed the door, and told me two things:
1. Your relationship with programmers is everything
2. There are only two teams at Microsoft to care about, Windows and Office.
Forget for a moment these specific points. Joe did the most important thing in the world as a boss. He gave me clear priorities. Even if they were wrong, from day one (ok, it was day two) he imparted his private view of how to succeed and how to make sense of things. It was amazingly empowering. I could slice through all of the work being thrown at me from across the team and the company, and divide into two neat piles: a) things to care about, b) things not to care about. Joe was a great boss and provided this kind of clarity all the time.
It turns out both bits of advice were right.
Your relationship with programmers is everything
As a program manager (glorified title for project manager), all of my power actually came from the programmers. I only had a job because of the programmers. No programmers means no code, no product, no revenue. End of story. My power was an extension of theirs. I had to treat them with respect and go out of my way to earn their trust over time.
This meant first and foremost I had to earn their respect. Help them make decisions. Bulldoze organizational road blocks out of their way. Prove I was smart, that I could help them make tough decisions, and could make the product much better even though I couldn’t write code as well as they could. And only after establishing that value could I be a team leader and be of true use to the project. With programmers as allies, working with marketers, testers, executives, or leaders of other teams, became easier, and my role as a team leader became possible.
When I visit companies or talk to people, and they tell me they rarely talk to the programmers, a red flashing light goes off in my head. How on earth do you have any power? I wonder. You don’t know the people who actually make the thing you are managing! You have no idea if they believe in what they are doing or not, or if they have better ideas than yours. Something critical is broken if project managers don’t have collaborative and trusting relationships with programmers. If there is a problem between PMs and programmers, it’s the PMs job to fix it. Odds are they’re better at communication, conflict resolution and have more perspective, all of the key skills for resolving differences and building relationships. Put another way: if you’re a PM and your team hates you, what else do you have? Your relationship with your team is everything.
There are only two teams at Microsoft to care about, Windows and Office.
Back in 1995 when Joe gave me this advice, it was true. There were only two groups at Microsoft that were successful and brining in sizable revenue. The problem was working on Internet Explorer during the browser wars, every one of the 100 teams in the company wanted something from me, and every other PM on the team. They wanted us to add features to help promote their work, code changes to fix bugs that bothered them, etc. There was a huge pile of people who wanted to influence the work I managed. My phone rang all the time and my inbox was always full. If I treated everyone equally I’d be doomed. Couldn’t be done. I had to ignore, or say no to, most of the people who wanted something from me. With Joe’s advice I had a rough guide for sorting it out. Tons of exceptions of course, but the baseline advice was right and useful.
Good managers give these little bits of power insight all the time. Dividing up the complex, stressful working world of projects into two piles. A project manager derives his power from this kind of clarity, especially if he can articuate it to others like Joe did to me.
(Back story: The idea of program managers, roughly a sergeant level generalist who drives projects, is an idea I like. It’s a job role Microsoft started in the late 1980s . It’s a job I had in the 90s).
Which gets to the question of should PMs do design.
The easy answer is yes, if they are good at it. Most are not. Most do not know this because they’ve never met an interaction designer, someone who does it professionally for a living. Simply because Fred is better at it than his peers, he assumes he is good. It’s not his fault exactly. Most computer science programs and business schools never talk to design schools. Certainly not about how much they need to learn from the other. And most program managers in the world are hired from computer science and business schools.
Anyway, the better teams at Microsoft figured this out over a decade ago. They did one of:
Hired full time UI designers and usability engineers. (In 2003, when I left, there were over 400 of these people employed at Microsoft).
Created a special role called a UI PM, who was the PM good at design who led the UI work.
Or both.
VPs that cared about ease of use invested in these assets, and just as important, built a culture around ease of use taking priority over other considerations.
However, in most cases the above investments had moderate impact on product quality because these people never receive sufficient power to overcome the other 20 PMs running around. Sometimes all the PMs are ignored anyway by the programmers but they are in denial about it, so it’s moot until that fight for power gets sorted out.
The program manager model is just one idea for diving up work. It’s a good model, but does have it’s problems. On larger teams it’s too easy for PMs to get lost in their egos and self-interests, each one fighting to make a great feature, inside of what becomes a mediocre product. It’s also a role that depends on culture, you can’t just graft it on and expect it to work as it impacts everyone.
Program management works best on smaller teams, or in organizations where the PM can have significant power. Once you have 15 or 20 of them running around it gets hard to sort things out. Imagine 15 or 20 film directors trying to work on a film together. If you give them enough power, you don’t need many film directors. And if you don’t need many, it’s easier to find ones with all of the talents you want, including the ability to design user interfaces.
The bottom line: program managers are generalists
At the end of the day it doesn’t matter who makes the UI design decisions provided they are good and they ship. If you’re a PM, your primary obligation is the quality of what goes out the door. If you have someone other than you available who is good at design, your top priority should be to get out of their way, just as you would for someone good at programming, testing, or any other role. Find other things to do to keep busy – I’m sure they exist. The value of the PM, or any manager, is their ability to fight for the best use of everyone’s time, including their own.
If ease of use is truly important in what you’re making, odds are it deserves the attention of a specialist or two who can dedicate their energy to it. If nothing else, they can teach you some of the stuff you don’t know you need to know. PMs can rarely dedicate their attention to anything, as their value is their ability to co-ordinate and lead.
The bestselling book I wrote about program management, Making Things happen, has several nice chapters about how to lead design and customer research, and advocates the above advice.
The big news in this corner of the world are the layoff announcement at Microsoft. Steve Ballmer’s email drops this midway through an email this morning:
As part of the process of adjustments, we will eliminate up to 5,000 positions in R&D, marketing, sales, finance, LCA, HR, and IT over the next 18 months, of which 1,400 will occur today. We’ll also open new positions to support key investment areas during this same period of time. Our net headcount in these functions will decline by 2,000 to 3,000 over the next 18 months. In addition, our workforce in support, consulting, operations, billing, manufacturing, and data center operations will continue to change in direct response to customer needs.
It’s the biggest cutback in company history and my thoughts go out to anyone who is impacted today.
My take:
This is small potatoes in business history. It’s 5000 jobs over 18 months, a long spread, with an impact that many parts of the company won’t even notice. The normal attrition rate at a tech company has to be around 10% and 5000 jobs from a company of 90,000+ is about 5%.
The company will open new positions at the same time. The sky is not falling here. Eliminating jobs but creating new ones too (although it doesn’t specify a hiring target). There was an 11% drop in profits from last year, but other than Apple this doesn’t seem far off the mark for the sector, or the business world at large.
Drawn out firings. More notable is the choice to leave this open ended and draw it out over 18 months. What a morale hit. Bad news is best all at once. It frees people to move on and doing it early gives them an advantage. But now, without guidance to the contrary (e.g. cuts will focus on divisions X,y and Z) everyone is led to believe their jobs will depend on their review performance, making people look out for themselves at work more than is healthy for any team over the next year.
No Merit increases in FY ’10. We’ve seen the stick, where is the carrot? Recessions should mean smaller carrots, or maybe a less expensive vegetable, but something. I’d drop an entire product, or close down the least strategic group in my company, before I took away performance rewards.
The best summary of news so far and juiciest insider comments can be found at mini-microsoft.
1) Maniacally focus on building a product your customers will love.
– Pound, pound, pound on the features while they are being developed all the way through the process.
– Constantly ask ‘How do we know this is good?’
– Perceive the reaction of others to your features.
– Know others will want to have an opinion.
– Recognize constraints make it hard to develop products customers will love.
– This takes energy, persistence and creativity.
An interesting follow up question is if great PMs focus on making products customers will love, why does it seem Microsoft generally fails at this.
Some of you know I worked at Microsoft years ago (’94-’03) as what they call a program manager. In any other company the job would be known as team lead or project manager, and it was an awesome job.
When I was hired 1994 there was a cult around the role. Program Managers had a reputation for being people worthy of being afraid of for one reason: they knew how to get things done. If you got in their way, they would smile. And then eat you. They drove, led, ran, persuaded, hunted, fought and stuck their necks out for their teams with an intensity most people couldn’t match. The sort of people who eliminated all bullshit within a 10 foot radius of their presence. How to be this way, and do it without being an asshole, was one of the things I tried to capture in my book, Making things happen. All teams need at least one leader who has this kind of passion and talent regardless of where you work or what you’re working on.
But that cult has faded. I have many friends and a few clients at Microsoft, and talk with more through email and on the pmclinic discussion list, and I’m convinced true PMs are a dying breed. I suspect they were a dying breed before I started at the company and I was just lucky to be hired into a pocket still running strong. Group managers like Joe Belfiore, Hadi Partovi, Hillel Cooperman, and Chris Jones all created a landscape for PMs like me to drive and lead their teams, and made it possible for us to do a lot of good for our teams that no other role could do.
One change is the enormous growth of Microsoft since I was hired. I started in ’94 as employee #14,000 something, and now there are nearly 90,000. Bureaucracy, overhead and dead weight collect in big successful companies and Microsoft is no different. This makes it much harder to consolidate the kind of power a PM needs to behave the way I described above. The PM role has been stretched so thin there are PMs for everything, and if ever a position needs to be created that isn’t quite a marketing, programmer or tester position, but isn’t a leadership or management role, the PM label gets used anyway. Somehow it’s a crime for there to be more than 10 job titles at a company. I’m not sure why.
In many cases teams have so many PMs, and authority is so loosely distributed, than would should be simple decisions require a meeting of 8 or 10 or 15 people. Cycles of meetings on the theme of “are you ok with this? How about you? And you?” As if everyone deserves a vote on every decision. This kills momentum and wastes the value of what PMs can do. And as this goes on for years, with larger and larger staffs, no one knows what it’s like to have a clear, fast process for making basic decisions. Few remember what it feels like to be on team that has synergy, clarity, trust and focus, eliminating the need for hand-holding, triple level reconfirmations, and spending hours every week un-reversing decisions that should never have been reversed in the first place.
I hear from PMs who I suspect no longer recognize 3 hour meetings that are 100% guaranteed to be a complete waste of time, because many of their meetings are complete wastes of time. By the same token, I know PMs who work on teams that are entirely out of control, and failing in the marketplace, who think it’s normal for a team to be entirely out of control and failing in the marketplace. They’ve never seen anything else. And sadly in some cases, neither have their bosses, or (gulp) their VPs. They believe a PM is supposed to feel, much of the time, useless, ignored, and in the way. Instead of realizing that those feelings come from their failure, and the group managers failure to enable them, to do what the role was designed for.
I gave a lecture at Microsoft before I left in ’03 titled The problem with program managers that outlined many of these problems and what can be done to avoid them. All management roles run the risk of being wastes of space, and project management roles are no different. And if there’s interest I’ll pull some of those nuggets out into future blog posts.
But are there still surviving pockets of old school PMs? If so, I’d love to hear from you, at Microsoft or elsewhere.
These were some of the questions I was asked during Q&A, with fresh and extended answers:
Q: How do you rationalize your statement that there is no single method for innovation, with your advice for managers (delegate) at the end of your talk?
The advice I gave (delegate, take risks, reward initiative) is the best basic advice for the most common problems I see in my travels. The three most common failings in managers that say “I want my team to innovate” are failing to trust their teams (delegate), failing to make big bets (take risks), and penalizing people for following their ideas into controversial territory.
This isn’t a magic recipe that works 100% of the time, but if I’m talking to a crowd of 200 people and know nothing about their individual circumstances, this is the first advice I offer. Its’ simple stuff, but still rare even when the I-word is thrown down as a goal.
Q: In your Luddite example you pointed out how hard it is to make change happen. Any advice for innovators on working around this challenge?
1. Pick your manager carefully. Your direct boss has more influence on your ability to take risks than anyone else in the company. I’d rather work on a boring, v12 product with a great aggressive manager who wants change to happen, than be on super-duper cutting edge big budget team, with a scared, conservative, Paxil addicted manager who says No to everything.
2. Don’t call what you’re doing change. Call it satisfying customers. Call it making money. Find some other attribute that your idea will provide the company and focus on talking about that instead. Don’t say “This is a huge revolution in blah blah blah.” Instead pitch something like “This plan will eliminate our top 5 customer complaints and improve sales by 10%”. Make a non-change centric argument. It’s not hard. Fish through the project and division goals for a good angle to pitch your ideas.
3. Find allies. Study any revolution and you’ll find cabals, coalitions, and partnerships. Who are your partners for change? You have to weigh the size of your ideas against the size of your political power. Have big ideas? Get more power. Can’t get more power? Pitch smaller ideas until you have proven yourself and earned more power or credibility (which is a kind of power). Look for who else is pitching ideas and what results they get. Pay attention to what arguments work in your culture.
Q: Is Microsoft an imitator? Given your experience here and elsewhere, how do you view the perception of MSFT and other companies as innovators or imitators?
Study the history of any idea and the notion of originators and imitators gets fuzzy fast. Neither Microsoft nor Apple invented any of: GUIs, Mice, Web browsers, Digital music players, cell phones, touch-screens, video games, icons, ethernet, Wireless networking, windows/menus, multi-tasking OSes, and on it goes. An entire chapter of the Myths of innovation explains how futile it is to worry so much about being first. How about being good? Making the best thing or the best manifestation of an idea? It’s a more potent criticism of Microsoft to say their products are bad or hard to use. Or boring. Or unreliable. Those are criticisms of design attributes that might lead to productive conversations.
Regarding being first, consider the i-pod and i-phone. The i-pod is a fantastic design for a portable music player but it’s far from the first implementation of the idea (The Sony walkman doesn’t get mentioned nearly enough in that conversation). The i-phone is far from the first cell-phone, and probably the 500th design of a telephone. Who cares who was first? Most of the time I don’t. History favors people who do things well, more than who does them first. Edison and Ford weren’t technically first with the idea for light bulbs or cars. Do you care? Probably not.
For this reason critiques like Microsoft The Innovator? that try to prove Microsoft is not innovative are just silly. Apple doesn’t show up well either as the first originator of big ideas in technology. Few major corporations ever do. By the time it’s in productizable form, an idea has been touched by many many people and often many different companies. And the skills required to manage a mass market product are very different than those required to invent a new kind of mass market product.
What I think people mean to say about Microsoft, really, is that their products are never inspiring to consumers. They do not generate excitement in the way people think innovations are supposed to. Instead they have earned a reputation for being generic, bland and corporate, with lots of blue and gray and little personality. This is hard to refute (There are exceptions, like XBOX, Encarta, Citysearch, Expedia, and Zune, but Microsoft has never used PR and branding to promote them as more than that). Stereotypically when Microsoft enters a market behind other companies they do little to differentiate themselves in consumer visible ways. They match features, offer generic branding, and chase. Microsoft has always been great at the chase. Part of the reason is that Microsoft has always been mostly a mediocre products company, but a strong platforms company. The big bets are not on the products, but on the strategies behind the products, which explains the occasions they’ve been successful in markets with superior competing products: the superior business model won against a superior product.
Anyway, this is a fun question but it doesn’t lead anywhere practical unless you are a CEO. For the rest of us the best thing to focus on is making something great. Make a great thing. Fuck, make a good thing: half the companies out there can’t even do that. Don’t worry about being new, or who you are imitating (unless you’re breaking the law), just make something that solves a real problem for people and you’ll be way ahead of the curve. If you make a superior product it’s guaranteed some of your ideas with be seen as creative or original, but they’re most often found as a by-product of trying to solve a problem really well. Innovation as a concept is a red herring. It’s slippery, misleading and distracting. I use the word as little as possible and recommend you do too.
Q: What is the role of culture in making innovation happens? Are there really as many recluses and lone geniuses as we think?
Easy one first: true recluses are rare. Most famous genius types had friends and collaborators whose role is often ignored in our hero worship. They had parents, friends, and sometimes even collaborators. Isaac Newton, one of the most reclusive of the recluses, had allies in the Royal Academy of Science that helped publish his papers and advocate his interests.
Thinking as a manager, culture is everything. If you think of ideas as a kind of wildlife, only certain types of environments are habitable by ideas. The job of any manager or leader is to create an environment for ideas to thrive. In chapter 7 of the Myths of Innovation I break creative culture into the following elements: Life of ideas, environment, protection, execution, and persuasion. Many of the famous centers of innovation in history scored well on these factors and the book explores some of those stories. If you’re culture is idea-averse, or loves to shoot down ideas quickly, you could have DaVinci and Einstein on your squad and invent nothing. The corporate world should be hiring more anthropologists to help us see the cultures we’re unintentionally making.
Have more questions on Microsoft, Innovation or culture? Fire away in the comments.
When Making things happen came out in March, I did a few talks here and there to help promote the new edition, including a stop at a little place called Microsoft, in Redmond, WA. They videotaped the talk and it’s now available online.
You need to be running IE, or using the IE plugin for firefox, for the video to play. Sadly it appears to run on Windows only (I know, I know – its not my choice):
Title: How to make things happen
Description: What are the secret tactics used by successful project managers? How can people in any role, from development to management to design, benefit from their playbook?This fun, fast-paced, and interactive talk, loosely based on the bestseller Making Things Happen (formerly known as The Art of Project Management), explains how to make good things happen, and how to triumph over powerful people who are annoying and frustrating. Bring your toughest questions and situations for the Q and A, where Scott gives away signed copies of the brand-new, updated edition of Making Things Happen.
How do you rationalize your statement that there is no single method, with your advice for managers (delegate) at the end of your talk?
In your Luddite example you pointed out how hard it is to make change happen. Any advice for innovators on working around this challenge?
Is Microsoft an immitiator? Given your experience here and elsewhere, how do you view the perception of MSFT and other companies as innovators or immitators?
What is the role of culture in making innovation happens? Are there really as many recluses and lone geniuses as we think?
I’ll update this with my answers shortly.
I’ll be swinging by Microsoft next week to speak at the Microsoft Research lecture series. I’ll be talking about Innovation, and telling stories that didn’t make it into the Myths of Innovation book with lots of Q&A.
WHO: Scott Berkun
TITLE: The Myths of Innovation
WHEN: September 9, 2008
WHERE: 99/1919 (Redmond, WA, USA)
TIME: 1:30-3pm
HOST: Kim Ricketts and Kirsten Wiley
Is it any wonder things are slowing at Microsoft with goals like these?
Ballmer writes:
Therefore, my priorities are consistent with last year. In FY09 we must continue to:
1. Invest in the right opportunities;
2. Expand our presence with Windows, Office, and developers;
3. Drive end user excitement for our products;
4. Embrace software plus services; and
5. Focus on employee excellence.
These are the same goals Microsoft has had FOR A DECADE. It’d be impossible to know this was written in 2008 if the lead in sentence were removed. Consistency of leadership can be great, but be consistent in vision, not at the goal level.
Worse, #1 and #5 are wastes of goal space. A good goal makes decisions easier to make. How does it help any of Microsoft’s 80,000 employees for the CEO to say “Invest in the right opportunities”? As if there are hordes of managers running around trying to invest in the wrong ones? The #1 slot is the big gun, the first shot, the lead idea, and in this list it’s fired into the ground.
Here’s my take on the other 4 goals:
2. Expand our presence with Windows, Office, and developers;
Windows and Office have been market leaders for years. The big goal for ’09 is to expand presence? That’s the secret to the future of Microsoft? Getting the last .005 of market share left? First off, I don’t believe Microsoft executives truly believe this is the future, but they really don’t know what else to say. It is still a two horse company unwilling to confess, even inside the company, that all its attempts for a third horse have been qualified failures (MSN, Interactive TV, Mobile, XBOX, etc.) If they’d do a postmortem on these efforts and educate the company and what executives have learned from these efforts, the company would get 20% smarter (yes it’s a made up number), instantly. Microsoft has a ridiculous amount of untapped experience since they hide their failures internally and never share their big, expensive lessons (Bob, MSN, Search, etc.). If every VP and middle manager were forced to write a postmortem and publish it internally, Microsoft would instantly become a dramatically smarter company.
3. Drive end user excitement for our products
This is weird. It doesn’t say make great products. Nor does it say have amazing levels of customer satisfaction. It says drive excitement. If ever there were grounds for calling Microsoft products over-marketed and under-designed on purpose, this is it. Excitement for a thing can be generated in different ways, and only some of those are beneficial in the long term. How about “Make great products that drive end use excitement” or “Earn customer love through making people’s lives better” or some statement that connects a good cause with a good effect? That would clarify the valuable kinds of excitement from the fluffy kinds.
4. Embrace software plus services
Microsoft started talking about software as a service back in 2005, and years earlier internally. It was a big campaign back then and it led to the launch of Windows Update and similar services across the company. So what does it mean in 2008 to embrace software plus services? I don’t know. Haven’t they mostly been embraced already? And besides, an embrace isn’t the best verb to use in a goal. What effect do we want the embracing to have? That’d be a better goal. Any idiot can embrace something (a light post, a stuffed animal, etc.) but that’s not as impressive as doing something meaningful with it.
5. Focus on employee excellence.
Like Goal #1, this is a waste of goal space. Is there anyone actively focusing on employee incompetence? This goal, as written, suggests there is. And the verb, to focus, is not progressive. What if I’m already focused, should I be focusing more? A goal should be a horizon to chase. Words like improve, increase, grow, and develop are all stronger verbs.
If I were Ballmer’s editor, here’s the revision I’d offer of what I think is his message:
Make smart investments and evangelize the lessons we learn
Create great products that naturally generate end user excitement
Combine software and services to provide great customer experiences
Three goals. No fluff. Strong verbs. Clearer direction.
Caveats
I’m not sure the above would be my leadership message if I were CEO. But it is an improved version of what i think he was trying to communicate in the goals.
$60 billion in revenue in FY08 is a ridiculous level of success by any metric. Hard to say how long this will last since it’s largely driven by the two horses (Office, Windows), but while it does you can’t pick too hard on Microsoft as a business.
Writing goals as a CEO for 80,000 company is quite different than writing goals for a 50 person software development project.
If the goal is to get a stagnant project to be more creative or productive, the best move is often to get people out of the room. Young ideas are fragile. The more people that are involved, the higher the odds someone will find a reason to kill good ideas before they’ve had a chance to prove themselves. The more people in the room, the more politics and private agendas negatively influence conversations. Diffuse authority can mean no one feels they’re accountable, or even wants to be.
Firing people, or eliminating positions, is on one extreme end of the spectrum and it has its place. Sometimes there is no other way to create room for progress to happen. But on the more conservative end of the same spectrum, simpler decisions available include:
Get people off the project by assigning them elsewhere
Reduce the invite list for creative meetings
Clarify who is in charge of creative decisions (e.g. who is the equivalent of the film director)
Clarify whose role is to give feedback, but not to drive the show
If your meetings are too slow, or arguments go on for too long, rethink your invite list. Why do so many deserve a say on so many things if their feedback is so uninspired? Pick the least useful people and make their power over creative decisions match their usefulness.
Often referred to as Too many cooks, no matter how smart the people are, if they all think insist on fighting for their own vision, misery ensues. Start-up companies thrive in part because there are way more decisions to be made than people, granting individuals tons of autonomy. When there are 10 decisions to be made, but only 2 people, there’s little motivation to fight over decision making power. But when a company grows and the ratio of people to decisions runs the other way (2 decisions to be made by 10 people), the thriving ends and the bureaucratic misery begins.
Firing people, or simply eliminating the number of leadership roles, recentralizes authority. It empowers those remaining in leadership roles to do far more in far less time, since overcoming the objections of dozens of peers are no longer part of the process of developing news ideas and projects. In organizations were there are far too many project managers, producers, and middle-managers, roles prone to measurement and process, eliminating those roles is the only way to give creative leaders the space they need to excel.
When I was at Microsoft (’94-’03) the biggest inhibitor to innovation was too much democracy. Hard to believe, but it’s true. There is a long history of internal projects with great ideas that never made it out of Redmond – they were killed by the culture of rough consensus. If a handful of middle managers couldn’t achieve rough consensus on your idea, your project got thrown into the closet (and often you with it). Grand ideas are often divisive, and a rough consensus decision making system will kill them. Many companies I’ve visited over the years suffer from the same pattern of behavior. They mistakenly believe the problem is the quality of ideas, when in fact the problem is the conservative psychology inherent in democracy. Pure democracy is not the political system that will create the most change – it’s a system geared for stability, not for innovation.
I’ve seen many great designers, engineers, and even managers hired in to well known companies, who prototype great things, and propose grand ideas, but watch in slow despair as the corporate culture’s insistence on letting everyone have their say watered their ideas down into mediocre, barely recognizable, intellectual sludge. You could throw a Johnathan Ives, a Rem Koolhaas, or a Will Wright, into most of corporate America and the output of those companies would barely change. Why? Too many cooks.
Some would argue this is by design – consistently mediocre is better than what many companies produce, and it can be enough to be a market leader (Look around: the best selling music, food, or software is unlikely to be considered the best by anyone in that field). And that’s fine: success and creativity are two related but different things. However if you ask for more innovation without changing the authority structure, I’ll call you crazy. Consensus is prone to slamming on the brakes – Autocracy is prone to putting the pedal to the metal.
The answer for many organizations is to shift the pendulum of authority two notches away from democracy and towards autocracy. I’m not saying create a tyranny – don’t go all the way – but do identify the creative leaders and give them leadership power based on those talents. To be a VP, or a General manager depends on political acumen, not creative insights, despite how the hubris of power muddles the distinction. If instead a VP or GM grants the best creative mind on the team license to lead, and rallies the majority of the team to accept the role of followers, the rate of positive change will always rise. Look to the autocratic models of building architecture, film making, and pop music – one or two creative minds are granted huge amounts of authority, disproportionate to the corporate hierarchy.
So when in doubt – look around the room. If your team is flailing or struggling to resolve a creative decision, create more autocracy. Either get the dead weight out of the room, or pick the person in the you as the leader believe has the best perspective and grant them your authority – let them make the call. If you can’t change the balance of power by any other means, thin the herd. If you have no other alternative, pink slips might be the best thing for everyone involved: the talent you fire may find, or create, the autonomy they deserve elsewhere. But either way, do what you can to give the creative minds in your world the autonomy they need to thrive.
