I would have fired him too!

Freedom of expression is not a license to be an asshole.

Plenty of pixels have been expended on the diversity memo from a Google engineer who argues that efforts to improve diversity were a waste of time.  I have been following the arguments and spoken with friends about the dust up.  It dawned on me that this is not a question about diversity versus political correctness.  The entire affair is really about teamwork and being a jerk to you colleagues.  The author of the memo is not free thinking but using pseudoscience to justify biased views.  As an agilest and leader, there is no room for these individuals in your organization.

Over the years, I have been critical of the “brogrammer” culture.  I have also been critical of engineers who think gender is a disqualifying factor to work in technology.  Last week, I further bemoaned the lack of women in the development profession.  I placed much of the blame on a feedback loop of men pursuing computer science careers and providing a leg up to other men in the industry.  It is also apparent to me that working in technology gives certain individuals the license to be an asshole to others.

One of my favorite business books is “The No Asshole Rule,” by Robert I. Sutton, Ph.D.  Sutton does a fantastic job providing a scholarly definition of what an asshole is and reasons why you do not want them in your business.  I think it should be required reading for any business person along with the “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team,” by Partick Lencioni.  

According to Sutton, an Asshole has two traits:

• Test One: After talking to the alleged asshole, does the “target” feel oppressed, humiliated, de-energized, or belittled by the person?  In particular, does the target feel worse about him- or herself?
• Test Two: Does the alleged asshole aim his or her venom at people who are less powerful rather those individuals who are more powerful.

Based on the above criteria, it is evident to me that the author of the Google memo is an asshole.  The author considers himself and those like him intellectually and morally superior.  Since they are superior, they should not have to debase themselves by having to educate, mentor, or collaborate with those people.  This"other" could be women, ethnic minorities, and people living different lives.

A modern office is not an environment for this kind of thinking.  Women make up a large percentage of the work force and are filling senior leadership positions.  There are also countless people of color working as professionals.  Finally, individuals who are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender are collaborating with those who are not.  Anyone who considers themselves superior to others not like them is going to create tension and undermine collaboration in the office.  Eventually, behavior like this is going to trickle down to the bottom line.  From an agile perspective, individuals who feel this sense of superiority are going to be resistant to continuous improvement.  It is not a surprise the author of the diversity memo wrote this after attending a workshop on the bias.

As a manager and agilest I would have fired the author of the Google memo.  He was a distraction to the firm and advocating for a direction that the company had openly rejected.  Finally, his attitude to co-workers different than him would undermine any project he was assigned.  Better to remove a polyp than deal with cancer which could kill your organization.

Until next time.

I am taking next week off to attend the Gen-Con game fair. 

The Power of the Pivot

Sometimes you have to stop getting punched in
 the face to realize you need to make a change.

The life of a Scrum Master or Entrepreneur is filled with uncertainty.  Today’s sure thing becomes tomorrow’s dead end.  This is why I wanted to devote to this week’s blog to the power of being flexible.  In the parlance of Silicon Valley start-ups, pivoting is powerful.

According the Agile manifesto, responding to change is more important than following a plan.  This seems counter-intuitive at first but when you work in the software business for a while you understand why agile people say this.  I can’t remember how many times I have been involved in a course of action is a software project where I have been futility swimming upstream.  A slight course correction or change of approach would have sped up the project and led to success.  Unfortunately, project flexibility was not built into the project and as a developer I was doomed to work on a failing project.

If leadership was more flexible and willing to make changes in light of the current situation the chance of success might increase.  This is where we get the term pivot from.  I learned about it from a fantastic article from Vanity Fair about the purchase of Instagram by Facebook.  I highly recommend the article to anyone willing to learn about adopting to change.  In summary, Instagram’s CEO Kevin Systrom had numerous bouts of failure and frustration.  It was only after he pivoted his firm toward photography and filtering that he was able to find the success he was seeking.

I remember reading this article on a plan ride home from a corporate off site meeting.  I witnessed the new organizational chart and saw five people named project managers who I had personally trained to use Team Foundation Server.  I also noticed that I was not going to lead a software team.  I felt humiliated and my career was at a dead end.  I was filled with anger and frustration.  Something had to give, and it was clear to me that it would have to be my career at my old firm.  I got together with a few of my mentors in the agile community including Alan Dayley and they gave me the support and encouragement which I needed.  Within a month I had changed jobs and become an architect and scrum master at another company.  It is one of the few times in my career I can look back and say I did the right thing.

So my lesson is that sometimes you need to pivot to be successful. Blindly following a plan will lead to nothing be frustration and misery.  If something isn’t working try something else.  We invest too much into the sunk costs of our lives.  By pivoting or responding to change instead of following a plan, we gain a fraction of our lives back and learn to find success.  It is not as neat and orderly as we would like but in an uncertain world it is the only thing we have.

Until next time.