The city by the lake and technology

I live and work in the Chicago metropolitan area. It comprises the northern counties of Illinois and, like much of the Midwest, has challenging weather. Often, you can experience all four seasons in March. The climate creates a flintyness toward nature and forces us to be kind to one another because if nature is not pleasant, then at least we can be good to our fellow humans. It explains why Los Angeles and New York people call the Midwest friendly. The stereotype of the Midwest conceals a strong work ethic and a judgemental streak, which many of us, including myself, exhibit. Today, I want to discuss what that means in the Midwest technology business.

I joined the technology business in the mid-1990s. The main intellectual centers of technology are Silicon Valley in Northern California and New York City. New York's concentration of media company headquarters gives it a powerful grip on media-related technology. Silicon Valley became a land of myth and legend where coders got to make billion-dollar corporations. That myth has some truth because Hewlett Packard, Netscape, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook found a home in the valley and became household words.

The Midwest and Chicago represent what pundits dismissively call "fly-over" country. We are land you bypass to go from east to west. To many, the Midwest is about corn, hogs, and transportation to move those goods to the remainder of the country. Truthfully, the Chicago metropolitan area fulfills a vital role in the technology ecosystem, and it is the integration and interoperability of systems. Since its founding as a city, Chicago has been a hub of communications and a link between the eastern seaboard and the western frontier. As technology begins to eat the world, the city and metropolitan areas have specialized in the less glamorous aspects of technology, which keeps the global economy chugging.

Computer systems in banking, insurance, and business span fifty years, and they must communicate, or all forms of commerce will come to a grinding halt. Computer languages span functional programming languages, object-oriented development, and large learning models. Often, these disparate systems cannot speak to each other directly, so something called middleware is written to facilitate communication. Finally, businesses, cloud companies, and purveyors of Artificial intelligence need warehouse-sized facilities to house their servers and infrastructure. The Midwest and the Chicago metropolitan area excel at these activities.

People give more thought to those things once they break, which becomes a crisis. Midwestern technology professionals take pride in running these systems at peak efficiency with no downtime. Instead of splashy conference demonstrations, we prefer working software that others can test and experience for themselves. Reliable working systems are proof of skill instead of social media credibility.

This pragmatic streak defines most technology professionals in the Chicago area. In general, we do not want to change the world but instead want to make it better, faster, more reliable, and work with other systems. It takes an engineer's mind with an illustrator's creative sensibilities. It is long nights working on knotty problems and early mornings with off-shore teams on conference calls. Hard work and innovation combine to make technology work invisible, and Chicago plays a critical part.

During the days of the first Dot-Com bubble, The Chicago Tribune published a special technical classified page called "The Digital Prairie." Sadly, the Tribune became a victim of the digital economy, but I liked their portrayal of technology as a service and infrastructure that needs maintenance. So, the story of Midwest technology is getting desperate systems to work correctly and with little fuss. To Midwesterners, everything should be plug-and-play, behaving like magic. The reality is more complex, but the goal is what makes the digital prairie so fertile.

Until next time.

Leadership Techniques to Build Trust

The business world is like a merry-go-round, moving at unsafe speeds. Everyone is holding on for deal life, hoping they do not get thrown off and injured terribly. Instead of listening to concerns about the ride's speed, people stare blankly and condescendingly at those who raise the issue, refusing to believe them. No one understands why the ride turns so quickly, but to suggest otherwise seems like madness. I am in the middle of a career transition, which has given me time to reflect on what matters as a professional. 

The business press and popular culture spend plenty of time discussing leadership and vision in the business world. Many organizations need help putting people with leadership skills in the correct roles. Often, we promote people who need help to do the leadership job. The Peter Principle explains why many leadership roles in companies contain mediocre leaders. It is a principle that, when combined with the pressure to deliver revenue and profits to shareholders, further pushes people to extremes in behavior. Employees trapped in a cycle of abuse are forced to endure mistreatment from customers, often finding themselves under the leadership of managers who perpetuate the same behavior.

It paints a picture of incapable people with psychological trauma under unreasonable pressure, inflicting emotional harm on others to provide better customer service. It is a glum and ugly tapestry of alienation. It explains why strikes have increased since the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, and trends like quiet quitting have impacted offices worldwide. Something is broken in the work culture, hurting businesses, employees, customers, and society. 

In her book, "The Experience Mindset," Tiffani Bova points to three main issues that provide a roadmap to fixing broken work culture. Employees want to support doing their jobs. Short staffing, lack of supplies, and being penny-wise but pound-foolish undermine employee efforts to deliver the goods and services they provide. It is incumbent for organizations to provide that support. Next, employees want to be trained in the skills they need to succeed in their jobs today and in the future. It is a particular problem in technology as skills become obsolete in months instead of years. Finally, there needs to be trust between the people doing the work and the organizations they work for because, as Bova says, "Trust is the bedrock of any business."

The three mileposts of better employee experience are trust, training, and support, which organizations can provide if they treat employees with the same consideration as their customers and shareholders. What it requires is a different leadership style. We need a different approach instead of being feudal or authoritarian toward the people who deliver value to the organization. 

I have discovered a few methods which drive success. The first is the notion of servant leadership. A leader should serve the people who work with them. It requires time and emotional labor because instead of giving orders, you provide guidelines, psychological security, and an environment of trust. It can transform a group of misfits into high performers if done right. 

Next, I am a colossal propoment of L. David Marquet and his intention-based leadership. Marquet is a retired U.S. Navy Captain who commanded a nuclear submarine. Suppose there was a position that fit the autocratic mold of absolute power. In that case, it is responsible for atomic weapons, two hundred lives, and a two-and-a-half billion submarine. Marquet suggests a better way, which he calls intention-based leadership. He asks people to think about their actions and deliberate about what they will accomplish. Mistakes are forecasted instead of avoided, and people have the psychological safety to make decisions even in stressful situations like combat. Finally, intentional-based leadership says that everyone in an organization is a leader, not just those given the official title. It generates a feedback loop of trust, which helps everyone perform their roles better. 

Finally, Kim Scott and her book Radical Candor color my leadership worldview. She says that leaders need to care personally and challenge people directly. She also points out that you cannot be a jerk and be radically candid. Being a jerk is a behavior that can be changed with required effort and a willingness to change. 

Radical Candor, Intention-based leadership, and servant leadership can help build better teams and improve workplace culture. The techniques build trust, help employees develop the skills to be successful at their jobs, and provide the necessary support to do those jobs. It slows down the merry-go-round of the contemporary work culture. I plan to lead the way.

Until next time. 

The Anxiety and Instability of Professional Life

The professional world is brimming with instability. Some days, you are riding high on waves of success, and then it comes crashing into the shore, providing a harsh reality. It forces you to be humble because you become careless when you feel comfortable. The global economy is in a weird place, motivated by a tremendous sense of anxiety. The sizeable centralized nature of many organizations causes part of this anxiety. Today, I want to discuss it. 

Two of the most influential trends in the business world were ideological. The first came from the University of Chicago School of Economics and Professor Milton Freedman. The professor argued that the primary purpose of any business is to generate profits for its investors. Competing interests like employees and consumers were secondary in Freedman's view. The investors who put money at risk for the company should receive the lion's share of the wealth because they face the most risk. The shareholder theory of capitalism spread like wildfire through the business community. To drive profits, business people slashed headcounts at companies, squeezed salaries, and profit to shareholders became the only thing that mattered. Any other considerations would suffer. 

The other came from executive Jack Welch, who transformed General Electric into a corporate juggernaut. Instead of growing the business with better products, Welch grew G.E. through a ruthless combination of acquisitions and job cutting. Soon, G.E. resembled a giant unregulated bank, with shareholders keeping the party rolling as long as the dividend checks kept coming. When Welch retired, G.E. was a symbolic tower of beer coasters at the end of a bar that any mischievous patron could topple at any time. It is what happened as debts came due and the economy changed. Today, G.E. is a shell of its former self, divided into three smaller companies focused on building things instead of juicing share prices. 

Friedman and Welch have one thing in common: their belief that the people who did the work were expenses to be managed instead of people who created value for the business and its investors. It made a wave of downsizing in the business world, and departments shrank. The mantra among business professionals was to create lean organizations. 

The rise of computers and photocopiers slashed the clerical staffing at an organization. A professional had to advance into management to advance a career instead of earning tenure in your position. The situation resembled the book "Lord of the Flies," where to get ahead, you had to be hypercompetitive and jerk to your peers instead of working together. Numerous business cultures get caught up in this cycle of psychological violence and dysfunction until they ignore their core business and customers. I have experienced this firsthand, and it isn't pleasant.

The trend has plenty of names, like rightsizing, flattening the organization, and downsizing, but the impact is the same: fewer people doing more work. It has created a paradox in the business world because everyone is so busy that numerous choke points now exist, and work needs to be done promptly. Doing less with more is creating longer cycle times and more frustration. It also hurts workers who sacrifice mental health and family time to meet increasingly tricky corporate goals. 

The Agile reformation addresses the bottlenecks and frustrations of the corporate world. Still, business leaders who continue to treat employees like cost centers instead of people who deliver value are the principal obstacle to helping improve business culture. I look forward to the business community giving these individuals their comeuppance. 

Until then, I will keep working to make the business community more sustainable, sane, and satisfying. I hope you are along for the ride.

Until next time.

Fighting the Uncivil Office with Agile

The global economy is a rough place. One of the most challenging aspects of the worldwide economy is working with various people who keep it moving. Over my career, I have been amazed at the number of neurotic, damaged, and plain mean people I have experienced in business. It makes me wonder if the business work actively attracts these individuals or manufactures them over time. As I was recovering from my Thanksgiving gluttony over the weekend, I decided it was a subject worth writing about. 

Christine Porath may be a household name, but in 2018, she gave a TED talk at the University of Nevada. The woman who loves me forwarded the video: "She seems to know what you experience daily." She said. After watching the video, I rushed to the TED site and watched the entire presentation. Porath has something to tell us about the unhealthy environment of global business. 

Her thesis is simple. We do not treat people with enough respect in the office. Minor unkind actions lead to more significant problems in the office. Name-calling, disrespect, and othering build up like infectious pus ruining the organization. Eventually, the infection festers into poor performance and aggression. Incivility is a common disorder in the business world. It is a problem that made 80% of employees lose work time, 66% cut back on work efforts, and more than one in ten quit. The network company Cisco estimated the cost of incivility to its bottom line as twelve million dollars. 

Incivility is another form of waste in the workplace. Any good business person should be able to look at this expense and find ways to reduce it. The challenge is that two factors interfere with our ability to reduce this form of waste. The first is we are stressed and overwhelmed. Businesses are demanding that their employees do more work with fewer people. It means more work and fewer people to do it. Also, as work has become more specialized and intellectually demanding, the number of people who can do it well is decreasing. It creates all kinds of pressure in the technology world and gets vented in moments of rage and incivility. The other factor is that we condition business people to think that being a jerk is a path to leadership. 

Stories abound in the business world of leaders who practice a "mask of command." It is an artificial persona that portrays strength and competence but, in reality, often acts as a shield for being a jerk to others because, in the hypercompetitive world of business, nice people finish last. If you are warm and friendly, you are seen as competent and intelligent, inspiring others. The reason more business people do not do this is they "paid dues" in uncivil and exploitative environments. When they advanced, they went from receiving abuse to dishing it out to subordinates. It feels like a form of generational trauma, but it spreads out from the leadership team like pus poisoning the bloodstream from an infected wound. 

Fighting incivility in the office is challenging because it requires changing behaviors and processes instead of shuffling a few numbers around in a spreadsheet or creating an Instagram-worthy office. It means looking at people and understanding what motivates them and how to treat them with respect and dignity. It is not wearing a mask but caring about people personally and holding them accountable. As Kim Scott likes to say, there is a big difference between being a jerk and showing radical candor in the office. 

Uncivil behavior in the office should not be the price paid for a professional career. We should be able to live our lives and experience our careers with a positive measure of respect and dignity. Unfortunately, we do not understand that lesson until it is too late. I dedicate my career to making the office less ugly and uncivil. I hope that others will join me in this mission.

Until next time. 

Giving Thanks and Finding Meaning Over the Holiday

The Thanksgiving holiday in the United States is a strange time for business professionals. Most of the year, the company instructs us to sacrifice for our careers. The holiday arrives, and we slow down for a few moments to enjoy the company of family and friends. Only then do we understand the cost of our sacrifices at the office. Children grow up becoming people we do not recognize, and our romantic partners may be distant and alienated because we prioritize work. The messiness of our family life is a world away from the orderliness of budget reports and status updates. It is the tradeoff we made to provide for our families. 

I experience these feelings as much as the next person, but I always look forward to the holiday. Since childhood, I have treated the four-day Thanksgiving weekend like a small vacation and a chance to reset myself. It is a strategy that serves me well because spending time with family at the dinner table is much better from my perspective than sitting at a conference table with people pretending to be masters of the universe. Along with family time, part of my reset is expressing gratitude for what makes life meaningful. Today, I am going to take some time to do that. 

With the change of season, I read Viktor E. Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning.” Frankl gives a blunt and unflinching look at his experiences as a concentration camp inmate at Theresienstadt and later Auschwitz. Frankl lost everything during the Holocaust. His wife, mother, father, and brother all died by execution or illness. Frankl himself suffered starvation and beatings daily until he was near death before liberation by Allied forces in 1945. He has spent nearly four years in the concentration camps. 

What makes his story is the little details he reveals about life in the camps. The inmates treated their captivity like a full-time job and survival as a principal metric of success. Time would squash and stretch weirdly, with days becoming endless slogs of toil while weeks and months would drift by without consequence. It was looting the bodies of dead comrades for shoelaces, belts, and cigarettes. Captives looked forward to being last in line for soup because they would get a chance to receive a vegetable or scrap of meat in their bowl. Finally, Frankl observed that hunger and deprivation forced people to become their most essential selves. People who were decent and empathetic became more so, while selfish and cruel people became obvious. Confronted with death, humans are both the best and worst examples of how to be alive. 

Frankl does not consider himself morally superior and attributes his survival to chance. He uses his experiences to form his understanding of psychoanalysis and philosophy. It is that understanding that is the basis of a form of treatment called logotherapy and Frankl’’s observation that three things give people meaning even in the darkest circumstances. These three things are:

• Creating work or doing a deed.
• Experiencing something or encountering someone else.
• By the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering. 

The categories are deliberately vague because each person must discover what the work gives us; meaning or encounter provides value. What unites all humans is unavoidable suffering. People we love die from cancer. Old friends drift away, and the indifferent forces of the global economy can turn any of us into homeless beggars. We must find meaning in our world by being creative, loving someone or some experience, and finally learning to transcend the pain of unavoidable suffering. It is a blueprint for our absurd postmodern age. 

This Thanksgiving, I am grateful for everything that helps provide meaning to my life. 

• I am grateful to Capco for allowing me to help clients be more successful. 
• I am grateful to my peers in the Agile Reformation, including Dimple Shah, Thomas Meloche, and Diana Williams from Project Brilliant, who supported my efforts to make business more sustainable, sane, and satisfying. 
• I am grateful for my parents, who I can still enjoy time with and who encourage me the way only parents can. 
• I am grateful for a woman who loves me despite myself and has become my partner in this chaotic life. 
• The strange business environment of banking in 2023 has shown me who the saints are and exposed the sinners in a clarifying fashion. I am grateful for this moment of clarity. 
• Cancer caused plenty of pain and unnecessary suffering and exposed me to what mattered, which was the people around me that I loved.
• The war in Ukraine and violence in Gaza have clarified how I feel about violence and authoritarianism. I am grateful for that lesson. 
• Finally, I am grateful to the people who follow me on this blog, via social media, and in my video feed. Thank you for allowing me to share myself with you each day. 

Any comparison of being a paid professional in the twenty-first-century global economy with the experience of prisoners in the extermination camps of World War Two is ludicrous and stupid. I can gain wisdom for my world from the experiences of another. Frankl feels like a person from a different time who has something to teach us today. So, as I survey my family and the tradeoffs I have made to support them, I am grateful that I can rely on the wisdom of the past to make sense of the present. In 2023, the sacrifices were worth it. 

Now, pass the cranberry sauce, and see you next time. 

In Praise of Duct Tapers and Problem Solvers

The world of business is shifting and complicated. Billions of dollars are sloshing around the global economy, and currents of this activity impact each of us on the planet. It is hard to make sense of all the motion and activity, so the business press attempts to make sense of it with strange trend articles. Fobes magazine had an article about the five tribes of employees you find in the office and their possible leadership potential. I enjoy these articles as social exercises, but they left out a crucial component, and I feel compelled to discuss it. 

Ryan Hogg in Forbes reported that the good folks at Slack have identified five prominent workplace personalities. He then describes their unique characteristics and possible ability to lead business organizations. These subgroups are detectives, networkers, road warriors, problem solvers, and expressionists. I am including a link to the article here if you want the full details. 

What struck me about the article was the perky and upbeat nature of how Hogg describes these tribes of workers. Detectives are data-oriented, organized, and outcome-oriented, while road warriors are 'feisty' and have a different vision of success than typical employees. It is easy to be glum and write about work with a sense of futility and toil, so I am grateful for Hogg to take a different approach. 

Working in a contemporary office has gotten a bad reputation. As corporations have grown, we need to do a better job developing leaders, and profit-seeking is the central focus of our activities to the detriment of everything else. It is a toxic perfume of alienation and exploitation. It explains television shows like The Office and The IT Crowd have become cultural touchpoints in the UK and the United States. Our work lives contain plenty of farce and pathos. 

According to Hogg, people like me are problem-solvers. We adapt to technology quickly and like using new ideas to solve old problems. Slack's head of customer success said, "I expect to set the problem solver to be an integral part of an organization because they're going to be the people that adopt artificial intelligence much faster and find ways to make their jobs easier." 

Hogg ignored the definitive book about office subculture seven years ago, David Greber's "Bulls#it Jobs." In his book, Graeber uses his experience as an anthropologist to explain the five tribes of people who undermine organizations—he labels these groups flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters. Graeber's book is an unflattering look at corporate life and the "profound psychological violence" that accompanies it. 

Graeber and Hogg's overlap is the description of problem solvers and duct tapers; both live in an ambiguous realm of decisions requiring judgment and creativity. Duct tapers and problem solvers spend lots of effort fighting corporate red tape, fixing problems before they happen, and keeping the promises of others. They are project managers, scrum masters, and middle management types who support the organization. They also make many enemies because they spend most of their time challenging existing power structures and proposing new ways to do things. It requires technical and people skills with uncertain payoffs. 

I am proud to say that I have been a duct taper for the last twenty years of my career. Along the way, I have earned a few emotional scars and developed a reputation for frankness and delivery. Executives only understand the necessity of problem solvers and duct tapers once they need them. When a deadline is in jeopardy or an existential threat crops up in an organization, these people become saviors. Otherwise, they quit and join other organizations because even the best duct tapers and problem solvers know when to run for cover when an organization is about to blow up. 

So, if you want to ensure the survival of your organization, pay attention to this tribe of employees known as duct tapers and problem solvers. These people know your organization better than you do, from its seedy underbelly to the glamorous product launches. They also have a symbolic roll of duct tape to keep the organization from flying apart. It would help if you had more of them in your organization. 

Until next time. 

 

The Benefits of a Good Backlog.

My career is an adventure. Each week, I face new challenges as I attempt to help organizations deliver working solutions for the last ten years. I have experienced the Good, Bad, and Ugly of the technology business. I have never been a significant player, but in my small way, I have attempted to make life in the cubicles of your local office park a better place to work. Last month, I concentrated on creating a quality product backlog, and today, I want to summarize my thoughts on the subject. 

A product backlog is nothing more than a fancy list of work to accomplish. It should focus on delivering value to customers. Finally, it should obey the principles of Roman Pitchler's DEEP model. If these simple requirements are satisfied, your project and organization will be more successful than many attempting an agile transformation. 

The business exists to provide goods or services to customers. If done correctly, it is a mutually beneficial relationship where the customer gets what they want while the business makes a profit. It is up to the business to minimize waste and keep the customer happy. I am always amazed at how often this idea gets lost during a project. 

Inefficiencies and dysfunction reveal themselves during projects, and many of those issues are not engineering issues but are instead the products of human frailty. Ego and insecurity stalk the cubicles of many business organizations. High-paid executives throw their authority around to justify their existence. People will claim credit for work they did not do. Finally, pressured for time and short-staffed, people are expected to create complicated software solutions. It is no wonder that burnout is so rampant in the industry. 

I consider a healthy product backlog to be vital to success. Prioritization pr
events the highest-paid person in the room from overriding the organization's goals. By pointing out the importance of work to the organization and customers, questions of ego and authority fall away. If priorities are out of line with market demand, then the organization can pivot because the product owner and leadership team have an emergent backlog. We are empowered by estimation to make informed predictions about when work will be finished. Instead of an entire file cabinet of requirements that no one reads or refers to, the level of detail is sufficient to create working solutions. 

A simple structure of Bugs, User Stories, and tasks obeying the same workflow reduces conflict within a team and the larger organization. I wasted ten hours of billable time getting a development team to accept a product backlog item as a defect instead of a change request for one client. Because they were not paid to fix defects, the team treated everything as a change request, wasting time and avoiding the need to mitigate their poor code quality. A more straightforward backlog structure and clear expectations would have saved everyone involved time and money. 

The most crucial part of having a clear product backlog is that it is a public and transparent way to communicate how work moves through the organization. If someone wants to add work, they have to go through the product owner, and they can see the story move from creation to development to production. The organization sees how work flows through the system, and the organization can use the theory of constraints to help make necessary improvements to the system. Just like there are no secrets at a crap game, a good product backlog does not have any secrets. 

Each week is a new adventure, but with a proper backlog, most surprises are not career-threatening. 

Until next time.