책/Slack - Wooridle Wiki

Slack (Tom DeMarco) - Your Highlight on page 97 | Location 1484-1486 | Added on Sunday, November 24, 2019 2:40:33 PM

Setting a standard for the process establishes ownership. If I am your boss and I impose no standard on you, I’ve effectively let you own the process. But wait a minute. Who’s boss here? I am. So don’t I need to own the process? I certainly need to be in control, don’t I? ========== Slack (Tom DeMarco) - Your Highlight on page 98 | Location 1488-1489 | Added on Sunday, November 24, 2019 2:45:16 PM

Ownership of the standard should be in the hands of those who do the work. That is an ideal, one that you will probably never be able to attain completely, particularly in big companies. But it is always worth striving toward. ========== Slack (Tom DeMarco) - Your Highlight on page 98 | Location 1492-1492 | Added on Sunday, November 24, 2019 2:47:27 PM

Empowerment always implies transfer of control to the person empowered and out of the hands of the manager. ========== Slack (Tom DeMarco) - Your Highlight on page 98 | Location 1493-1501 | Added on Sunday, November 24, 2019 8:49:15 PM

The power you’ve granted is the power to err. If that person messes up, you take the consequences. Looked at from the opposite perspective, it is this capacity to injure the person above you that makes empowerment work. It leaves the empowered person thinking, “Oh my God, if I fail at this, my boss is going to look like a chump for trusting me.” There is little else in the work experience with so much capacity to motivate. Process standardization from on high is disempowerment. It is a direct result of fearful management, allergic to failure. It tries to avoid all chance of failure by having key decisions made by a guru class (those who set the standards) and carried out mechanically by the regular folk. As defense against failure, standard process is a kind of armor. The more worried you are about failure, the heavier the armor you put on. But armor always has a side effect of reduced mobility. The overarmored organization has lost the ability to move and move quickly. When this happens, standard process is the cause of lost mobility. It is, however, not the root cause. The root cause is fear. ========== Slack (Tom DeMarco) - Your Highlight on page 103 | Location 1567-1570 | Added on Monday, November 25, 2019 10:16:11 AM

Real quality has little to do with defects, but our so-called quality programs have everything to do with defects. The corporate Quality Program, at its heart, is a mechanism for driving out defects. When it succeeds, it will help you produce products that are defect-free, or nearly so. But are those products good for anything? Maybe yes and maybe no, but either way, it’s not due to the Quality Program. ========== Slack (Tom DeMarco) - Your Highlight on page 103 | Location 1578-1579 | Added on Monday, November 25, 2019 9:53:21 PM

Defect prevention and removal efforts may add sufficient overhead to the overall process so that it is too slow and unresponsive to market needs. ========== Slack (Tom DeMarco) - Your Highlight on page 105 | Location 1601-1603 | Added on Monday, November 25, 2019 10:00:33 PM

This relationship suggests a daring strategy for quality improvement: reduce quantity. Whatever it is that your organization makes, make less of it. Make less and choose much more carefully what it is that you make. ========== Slack (Tom DeMarco) - Your Highlight on page 108 | Location 1643-1647 | Added on Monday, November 25, 2019 10:10:31 PM

THE OVERSTRESSED ORGANIZATION is so busy making itself efficient that it has clean forgotten how to be effective. The two are not at all the same. You’re efficient when you do something with minimum waste. And you’re effective when you’re doing the right something. It’s possible to be one without the other: efficient but not effective, or effective but not efficient. Of course it is also possible to be both. Possible, but not easy. You ought not to be obliged to choose strictly between the two, but suppose you were. Which one would you choose? Efficiency or effectiveness? ========== Slack (Tom DeMarco) - Your Highlight on page 108 | Location 1647-1651 | Added on Monday, November 25, 2019 10:15:11 PM

An effective but not efficient organization moves steadily (though maybe not quickly) toward its real goals. How much progress it makes in that direction is a matter of how inefficient it is. An efficient but not effective organization, on the other hand, is moving in the wrong direction. The more it optimizes, the more progress it makes away from its real goals. Such an organization could say of itself, in Yogi Berra’s words, “We’re lost, but we’re making good time.” ========== Slack (Tom DeMarco) - Your Highlight on page 109 | Location 1667-1670 | Added on Monday, November 25, 2019 10:22:54 PM

All this suggests that a lot of companies are not really led at all. If that’s true, why isn’t it more apparent? Why don’t they seem leaderless? That is the direct result of what I call the Easy Executive Option. Directing an entire organization is hard. Seeming to direct it, on the other hand, is easy. All you have to do is note which way the drift is moving and instruct the organization to go that way. ========== Slack (Tom DeMarco) - Your Highlight on page 110 | Location 1672-1675 | Added on Monday, November 25, 2019 10:25:30 PM

In addition to being flat-out hard to do, building effectiveness into an organization often comes into direct conflict with increasing efficiency. This is an unfortunate side effect of optimization, first noted by the geneticist R. A. Fisher, and now referred to as Fisher’s fundamental theorem: “The more highly adapted an organism becomes, the less adaptable it is to any new change.” ========== Slack (Tom DeMarco) - Your Highlight on page 110 | Location 1677-1678 | Added on Monday, November 25, 2019 10:27:11 PM

The more optimized an organism (organization) is, the more likely that the slack necessary to help it become more effective has been eliminated. ========== Slack (Tom DeMarco) - Your Highlight on page 114 | Location 1741-1743 | Added on Tuesday, November 26, 2019 8:29:57 AM

After five decades of experience with MBO, its believers are still refining and redefining and still waiting for results. I’m ready to call MBO’s constant failure intrinsic. MBO is to an organization what Soviet-style central planning is to an economy: an idea whose time has passed. ========== Slack (Tom DeMarco) - Your Highlight on page 114 | Location 1744-1751 | Added on Tuesday, November 26, 2019 8:31:09 AM

“Fourteen Points” leading to organizational transformation.2 In point 12 of the Fourteen Points, Deming takes aim at MBO in all its forms. MBO, Deming writes, provides artificial, extrinsic motivators—the objectives—which drive out workers’ intrinsic motivators. So a salesperson, for example, driven by the extrinsic motivator of selling to a quota, will set aside the intrinsic motivator to assure customer satisfaction. The result is likely to be increased sales of marginally needed goods to a narrowing base of increasingly disenchanted customers. Deming’s advice on MBO: Get rid of it. 1 ========== Slack (Tom DeMarco) - Your Highlight on page 114 | Location 1744-1751 | Added on Tuesday, November 26, 2019 8:31:16 AM

I am not the first to rail against MBO. The first was, I believe, W. Edwards Deming, famous for his “Fourteen Points” leading to organizational transformation.2 In point 12 of the Fourteen Points, Deming takes aim at MBO in all its forms. MBO, Deming writes, provides artificial, extrinsic motivators—the objectives—which drive out workers’ intrinsic motivators. So a salesperson, for example, driven by the extrinsic motivator of selling to a quota, will set aside the intrinsic motivator to assure customer satisfaction. The result is likely to be increased sales of marginally needed goods to a narrowing base of increasingly disenchanted customers. Deming’s advice on MBO: Get rid of it. 1 ========== Slack (Tom DeMarco) - Your Highlight on page 114 | Location 1744-1750 | Added on Tuesday, November 26, 2019 8:31:31 AM

I am not the first to rail against MBO. The first was, I believe, W. Edwards Deming, famous for his “Fourteen Points” leading to organizational transformation.2 In point 12 of the Fourteen Points, Deming takes aim at MBO in all its forms. MBO, Deming writes, provides artificial, extrinsic motivators—the objectives—which drive out workers’ intrinsic motivators. So a salesperson, for example, driven by the extrinsic motivator of selling to a quota, will set aside the intrinsic motivator to assure customer satisfaction. The result is likely to be increased sales of marginally needed goods to a narrowing base of increasingly disenchanted customers. Deming’s advice on MBO: Get rid of it. ========== Slack (Tom DeMarco) - Your Highlight on page 115 | Location 1763-1764 | Added on Wednesday, November 27, 2019 7:59:40 AM

I suspect they treat it as the second of their two big problems: (1) can’t change and (2) can’t grow. They tend to miss that the second is a direct result of the first. ========== Slack (Tom DeMarco) - Your Highlight on page 115 | Location 1761-1764 | Added on Wednesday, November 27, 2019 7:59:51 AM

can’t grow if you can’t change at all. This may not sound like a revelation to you, but I frequently come across organizations that frankly admit they can’t change, that they are stuck in stasis, but nonetheless consider growth a normal expectation. It’s a big surprise to them when growth fails to happen. I suspect they treat it as the second of their two big problems: (1) can’t change and (2) can’t grow. They tend to miss that the second is a direct result of the first. ========== Slack (Tom DeMarco) - Your Highlight on page 115 | Location 1761-1764 | Added on Wednesday, November 27, 2019 7:59:54 AM

You can’t grow if you can’t change at all. This may not sound like a revelation to you, but I frequently come across organizations that frankly admit they can’t change, that they are stuck in stasis, but nonetheless consider growth a normal expectation. It’s a big surprise to them when growth fails to happen. I suspect they treat it as the second of their two big problems: (1) can’t change and (2) can’t grow. They tend to miss that the second is a direct result of the first. ========== Slack (Tom DeMarco) - Your Highlight on page 117 | Location 1784-1786 | Added on Thursday, November 28, 2019 9:12:08 AM

The most common sign of absent vision was the sense of not knowing “who we are.” One particularly depressing example was a top-level meeting at a new Valley dot-com where the company’s only apparent reason for existing was to make millionaires out of everybody in the meeting as quickly as possible so they could all retire. Nobody really wanted to be there two years later. ========== Slack (Tom DeMarco) - Your Highlight on page 117 | Location 1789-1790 | Added on Thursday, November 28, 2019 9:12:42 AM

“What was missing from that meeting, ” Sheila observed, “was someone who was willing ========== Slack (Tom DeMarco) - Your Highlight on page 117 | Location 1789-1790 | Added on Thursday, November 28, 2019 9:12:47 AM

“What was missing from that meeting, ” Sheila observed, “was someone who was willing ========== Slack (Tom DeMarco) - Your Highlight on page 117 | Location 1789-1791 | Added on Thursday, November 28, 2019 9:12:50 AM

“What was missing from that meeting, ” Sheila observed, “was someone who was willing to say, ‘Auction might be nice, but it just isn’t us.’” ========== Slack (Tom DeMarco) - Your Highlight on page 117 | Location 1793-1795 | Added on Thursday, November 28, 2019 9:14:10 AM

Vision implies a visionary. There has to be one person who knows in his or her bones what’s “us” and what isn’t. And it can’t be faked. Employees can smell an absence of vision the way a dog can smell fear. ========== Slack (Tom DeMarco) - Your Highlight on page 118 | Location 1795-1796 | Added on Thursday, November 28, 2019 9:15:06 AM

Vision is the sine qua non of constructive change. ========== Slack (Tom DeMarco) - Your Highlight on page 118 | Location 1795-1796 | Added on Thursday, November 28, 2019 9:15:10 AM

Vision is the sine qua non of constructive change. Without vision, a company can react, but it can’t pro-act. ========== Slack (Tom DeMarco) - Your Highlight on page 118 | Location 1799-1802 | Added on Thursday, November 28, 2019 4:14:13 PM

Successful change can only come in the context of a clear understanding of what may never change, what the organization stands for. This is what Peter Drucker calls the organization’s culture. Culture, as he uses the term, is that which cannot, will not, and must not change. ========== Slack (Tom DeMarco) - Your Highlight on page 118 | Location 1804-1806 | Added on Thursday, November 28, 2019 4:14:37 PM

If nothing is declared unchangeable, then the organization will resist all change. When there is no defining vision, the only way the organization can define itself is its stasis. Like the human creature that fights wildly to resist changing whatever it considers its identity, the corporate organism without vision will hold on to stasis as its only meaningful definition of self. ========== Slack (Tom DeMarco) - Your Highlight on page 119 | Location 1812-1821 | Added on Friday, November 29, 2019 12:54:08 AM

definitional. The successful visionary statement will typically have the following characteristics: 1. There has to be an element of present truth to the assertion. The challenge “Run a four-minute mile because that’s what we are all about ” would not inspire most of us because we wouldn’t see the present truth of the “what we’re all about” part. 2. There is always an element of proposed future truth in the statement. Though it masquerades as “what we are all about, ” it is at least partly urging us toward “what we could be all about.” 3. When the statement walks perfectly between what is and what could be, and the could-be part is wonderful but not impossible, acceptance by those listening is almost assured. ========== Slack (Tom DeMarco) - Your Highlight on page 119 | Location 1813-1821 | Added on Friday, November 29, 2019 12:54:12 AM

The successful visionary statement will typically have the following characteristics: 1. There has to be an element of present truth to the assertion. The challenge “Run a four-minute mile because that’s what we are all about ” would not inspire most of us because we wouldn’t see the present truth of the “what we’re all about” part. 2. There is always an element of proposed future truth in the statement. Though it masquerades as “what we are all about, ” it is at least partly urging us toward “what we could be all about.” 3. When the statement walks perfectly between what is and what could be, and the could-be part is wonderful but not impossible, acceptance by those listening is almost assured. ========== Slack (Tom DeMarco) - Your Highlight on page 121 | Location 1845-1847 | Added on Friday, November 29, 2019 8:12:28 AM

Leadership is the ability to enroll other people in your agenda. Meaningful acts of leadership usually cause people to accept some short-term pain (extra cost or effort, delayed gratification) in order to increase the long-term benefit. We need leadership for this, because we all tend to be short-term thinkers. ========== Slack (Tom DeMarco) - Your Highlight on page 121 | Location 1847-1852 | Added on Friday, November 29, 2019 8:13:08 AM

There is no easy formula for real leadership (if there were, we’d see a lot more of it), but it seems clear that the following elements always need to be present: Clear articulation of a direction Frank admission of the short-term pain Follow-up Follow-up Follow-up ==========