Refreshingly honest article by Jeffery Pfeffer (Stanford Professor):
My perspective is that organizations — which have laid off millions, which have workplaces filled with disengaged and dissatisfied employees, and which regularly, even in partnerships, cast people aside — can (and do) take care of themselves. My point of view is quite consistent with the popular idea of employees as free agents and the evidence on the ever-weakening bonds between people and their employers.
This is not to say that by helping people help themselves I am in any away against organizational effectiveness. A manager’s success and the success of her employer are positively related. But let’s be clear — this relationship is often small and sometimes absent. In the world of financial services, Stan O’Neal of Merrill Lynch and Frederick Raines of Fannie Mae were just two of many executives who oversaw the downfall of their companies while walking away with many millions of dollars. At lower levels, research shows that salary and job progression depend on educational credentials, years of experience, social similarity, and political skill, not just performance (either individual or organizational). It’s not enough to do good work. People who are not politically skilled will be outmaneuvered.
This basic fact of organizational life hit me again just the other day as a woman who had effectively run one of the centers at Stanford Business School for more than a decade sat in my office on the verge of tears. As part of a staff survey, one of her recently-hired subordinates had sabotaged her by questioning her efforts and commitment. The center directors she had served so well — and who, by the way, up until that point had consistently praised her — chose not to get involved. Now she is on her way out, good work, helpful demeanor, and center success notwithstanding.
Should my friend have been caught by surprise? Or should she have been more aware of what her “colleague” might be up to, and how she might protect herself? Focused on getting the work done and confident in its quality, she learned, as many others have, that organizational life is not always fair.
Don’t rely on the kindness of strangers, much less the unselfish support of colleagues or the good auspices of your employer. You have to fend for yourself, or like my friend and soon-to-be former coworker, you may find yourself in a bad situation.
———-
Me:
This is coming out of the top business school in the country. There has got to be a better way to live and work without having eyes in the back of your head; but for the near future let’s watch our backs and learn the political skills of surviving in the corporate world.
-Armond
P.S. Please post a comment.
Assessing people’s character is simple. All you have to do is ask three questions:
Only when you can give a definitive “YES” should you invest in the person.
- Lou Holtz (author, football coach)
Try it out on someone you know; it works every time.
“It is my duty and mission to put to work what I am good at, rather than to do what I love to do.” — Peter Drucker (Forward to Half-Time by Bob Buford)
Our eyes can certainly deceive us. Yet another proof of why it’s not wise to judge based on outward appearances.
Here’s a side-by-side view of “A” and “B”
See if your brain is as old as your body or (perish the thought) OLDER!
Read the following instructions since the game is in Japanese:
1. Touch ‘start’
2. Wait for a 3, 2, 1.
3. Memorize the number’s position on the screen, then click the circles
from the SMALLEST number to the BIGGEST
4. At the end of game, it will tell you the age of your brain.
Good luck!
P.S. After some practice, I got my brain’s age down to 35!
“A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain.” — Robert Frost
Recently, a number of Cutter Consortium IT consultants were asked to give predictions on upcoming trends for 2010 and beyond. Most of what they say about knowledge workers and their methods of collaboration are quite positive . In this post I have attempted to summarize what they said about collaborative software development methods.
Lots of mostly-positive things said about 2010! It will be fascinating to track these predictions. Of special interest to me is the adoption of Kanban in the enterprise given that Scrum (the most popular of the agile methods) has met with mixed results. In organizations that have not succeeded with Scrum, the managers do not want to go back to waterfall (although surprisingly many have) but are discouraged by the Scrum community to modify Scrum in any way (“don’t be a ScrumButt” is the popular phrase). Kanban brings a viable alternative with its roots firmly planted in the Lean community. It will be interesting to see how widely it is adopted over this year.
Please leave a comment if you found this post useful.
Armond Mehrabian
Agile management consultant and coach
(for the entire list click here)
Sanjiv Augustine, a senior consultant, believes that:
Claude Baudoin, a senior consultant, expects contractors and consultants to be in demand, and many of them will be ex-employees who, having found their past employer’s loyalty in short supply, will now be more interested in being their own boss than in rejoining as an employee. 2008 and 2009 saw a bloodbath in IT ranks. Never well-protected from corporate misunderstanding and even mistrust, IT was forced to cut everything that the CEO and the CFO did not understand - which is a lot. As activity picks up in 2010, there is no spare capacity to start new projects, and rehiring takes some time. Expect contractors and consultants to be in demand, and many of them will be ex-employees who, having found their past employer’s loyalty in short supply, will now be more interested in being their own boss than in rejoining as an employee (with fewer benefits than before they were released). There was already an erosion of the traditional employment model in favor of a contingent workforce. Expect that curve to go through a step function as a result of the crisis.
He believes that the outsourcing trend will lead to Innovation vs. Commoditization: A consequence of the recent crisis is that management has been looking to outsource everything in IT - often not even keeping enough people to problem-manage the contracts with outsourcers, provide sound governance, keep ownership of master data, etc. Innovation didn’t seem so important in 2008-2009, and didn’t Nicholas Carr say that IT didn’t matter anyway? Companies that followed this to an extreme will no longer have the internal talent to re-innovate when they need to, nor can they rely on companies halfway around the globe whose contract is purely about reducing the cost per transaction while maintaining a service level barely above acceptable. By 2012, expect that compelling user features, the kinds of things that make people camp out overnight in the rain in front of an Apple Store, will come from those companies that understood how to maintain, then quickly ramp up, an investment in IT innovation and in the people capable of it.
Gil Broza, a senior consultant, believes that in 2010-2011, Agile adoption will increase considerably, while the certification of newcomers will drop sharply in price and scale. As companies regroup post-recession, they will firm up co-located, on-shore development; any growth in off-shore efforts will be in the form of increased business representation.
Ken Collier, a senior consultant, believes that although Agile adoptions will proliferate, we will see an increase Agile project failures due to misunderstanding, misapplication, and misguided attempts to follow an “agile recipe.” Kanban will emerge as a powerful Agile technique for managing support and maintenance activities by software product companies.
Jim Highsmith, a senior consultant, states that in 2010 a small but significant number of organizations will “get it” when it comes to agility. They will begin to appoint Chief Agility Officers (CAO) who may initially report to the CIO, but over time will report to the CEO. These organizations understand that business responsiveness — agility — is key to their success and that creating a CXO-level officer to focus on responsiveness is as critical as creating CIO or CTO positions. The CAO’s role will be to extend agility far beyond agile software development or agile project management to agile customer solution delivery that might involve marketing, sales, distribution, or services delivery.
Mark Levison, a senior consultant, believes that there will be some big public agile adoption failures this year. These will be companies that tried to agile in name without understanding the change in values and mindset.
Bart Perkins, a senior consultant, believes:
Dave Rooney, a senior consultant, make predictions for the upcoming decade…
“I see Agile Software Development following the same pattern as two other game-changing trends — Relational Database Management Systems and Object-Oriented Programming. After early initial work in both of these areas, it took about 20 years for them to reach the Late Majority and Laggards phases of Rogers’ Technology Adoption Lifecycle. At the 10-year mark, both industries had significant breadth in terms of companies and their approaches and tools, and indeed there was fragmentation of exactly what RDBMS and OO even meant at that point.
100 All-Time Best Productivity Tips for Working -
So many good tips for productivity; guaranteed to contain a few new tips.
“But can one still make resolutions when one is over forty? I live according to twenty-year-old habits.” — Andre Gide