Slack

- Your Highlight on page 8 | Location 108-109 | Added on Wednesday, October 30, 2019 2:13:46 PM

The more efficient you get, the harder it is to change. The book shows managers how to make their organizations slightly less efficient but enormously more effective.

- Your Highlight on page 8 | Location 108-111 | Added on Wednesday, October 30, 2019 2:14:20 PM

The more efficient you get, the harder it is to change. The book shows managers how to make their organizations slightly less efficient but enormously more effective. It coaches them on the introduction of slack, the missing ingredient required for all change. It counsels a thoughtful use of slack instead of the mindless obsession with elimination of all slack in the interests of efficiency.

- Your Highlight on page 7 | Location 107-111 | Added on Wednesday, October 30, 2019 2:14:24 PM

Slack is a prescription for building a capacity to change into the modern enterprise. It looks into the heart of the efficiency-flexibility quandary: The more efficient you get, the harder it is to change. The book shows managers how to make their organizations slightly less efficient but enormously more effective. It coaches them on the introduction of slack, the missing ingredient required for all change. It counsels a thoughtful use of slack instead of the mindless obsession with elimination of all slack in the interests of efficiency.

- Your Highlight on page 8 | Location 114-116 | Added on Wednesday, October 30, 2019 2:15:22 PM

The average manager or knowledge worker is so busy today that there is simply not a spare moment for anything. There isn’t time to plan, only to do. There is no time for analysis, invention, training, strategic thinking, contemplation, or lunch.

- Your Highlight on page 8 | Location 122-123 | Added on Wednesday, October 30, 2019 2:16:50 PM

- Your Highlight on page 8 | Location 122-125 | Added on Wednesday, October 30, 2019 2:17:04 PM

Change is always complicated and challenging, but in the superaccelerated corporation, change of direction is almost impossible. The very improvements that the Hurry Up organization has made to go faster and cheaper have undermined its capacity to make any other kind of change. An organization that can accelerate but not change direction is like a car that can speed up but not steer. In the short run, it makes lots of progress in whatever direction it happened to be going. In the long run, it’s just another road wreck.

- Your Highlight on page 8 | Location 122-125 | Added on Wednesday, October 30, 2019 2:17:09 PM

- Your Bookmark on page 9 | Location 126 | Added on Wednesday, October 30, 2019 2:17:39 PM

- Your Highlight on page 11 | Location 160-164 | Added on Wednesday, October 30, 2019 11:03:17 PM

Now instead of eight tiles and one open space, we have a game with nine tiles and no open space. The efficiency of this layout is improved by 11.1 percent, since the waste space is gone, and all the squares are 100 percent in use. (Chances are that as you read these words, someone in your organization is applying the same logic to the office and seating plan.) Efficiency is improved, but something else is lost. Without the open space, there is no further possibility of moving tiles at all. The layout may be optimal as it is, but if time proves otherwise, there is no way to change it.

- Your Highlight on page 11 | Location 165-167 | Added on Wednesday, October 30, 2019 11:09:33 PM

The open space represents what I call slack, the degree of freedom required to effect change. Slack is the natural enemy of efficiency, and efficiency is the natural enemy of slack. And there is the rub: There are things you can do to make an organization more efficient that interfere with its ability to change and reinvent itself later.

- Your Highlight on page 12 | Location 178-180 | Added on Wednesday, October 30, 2019 11:11:18 PM

As one of my friends at Digital Equipment Corporation told me during the company’s darkest days, “There are madmen in the halls, looking for someone to ax.” Of course, the ones they were looking to ax were the folks who weren’t all that busy.

- Your Highlight on page 13 | Location 199-200 | Added on Wednesday, October 30, 2019 11:15:45 PM

Maybe middle management exists for some reason above and beyond filling the space between the top and the bottom of the hierarchy. Part of my purpose in this book is to examine what’s supposed to happen in the middle of a healthy organization, the critical role of middle management.

- Your Highlight on page 14 | Location 208-212 | Added on Wednesday, October 30, 2019 11:22:18 PM

Change and reinvention require a commodity that is absent in our time as it never has been before. That commodity—the catalytic ingredient of all change—is slack. Slack is the time when reinvention happens. It is time when you are not 100 percent busy doing the operational business of your firm. Slack is the time when you are 0 percent busy. Slack at all levels is necessary to make the organization work effectively and to grow. It is the lubricant of change. Good companies excel in the creative use of slack. And bad ones can only obsess about removing it.

- Your Highlight on page 16 | Location 232-233 | Added on Wednesday, October 30, 2019 11:35:22 PM

But first, I ask you to consider how busyness may hurt the effectiveness of even the lowest-level workers. Take, for example,

- Your Highlight on page 16 | Location 232-232 | Added on Wednesday, October 30, 2019 11:35:30 PM

But first, I ask you to consider how busyness may hurt

- Your Highlight on page 16 | Location 232-233 | Added on Wednesday, October 30, 2019 11:35:34 PM

But first, I ask you to consider how busyness may hurt the effectiveness of even the lowest-level workers.

- Your Highlight on page 17 | Location 258-262 | Added on Thursday, October 31, 2019 1:54:06 AM

- Your Highlight on page 17 | Location 258-265 | Added on Thursday, October 31, 2019 1:54:27 AM

A side effect of this optimally efficient scheme is that the net time for work to pass through the organization must necessarily increase. Think of it from the work’s point of view: The time it takes to move entirely through the network is increased by each pause it has to make in someone’s in-basket. If workers were available when the work arrived at their desks, there would be no wait and the total transit time would be reduced. But availability implies at least some inefficiency, and that’s what our efficiency program has drummed out of the organization. Making efficient use of workers in the sense of removing all slack from their day has an attendant cost in responsiveness and results directly in slowing the organization down. This is not an entirely happy tradeoff. As Bill Gates testified in the early proceedings of the Microsoft trial, “In the past, only the fittest would survive. Today, only the fastest will survive.”

- Your Highlight on page 17 | Location 258-265 | Added on Thursday, October 31, 2019 1:54:32 AM

- Your Highlight on page 18 | Location 275-275 | Added on Thursday, October 31, 2019 8:50:32 AM

substantial. In other words, improving efficiency may in many cases be countereffective. But

- Your Highlight on page 18 | Location 275-275 | Added on Thursday, October 31, 2019 8:50:39 AM

substantial. In other words, improving efficiency may in many cases be countereffective.

- Your Highlight on page 20 | Location 298-302 | Added on Thursday, October 31, 2019 8:54:36 AM

The assumption of fungible humans has come into its own in that mainstay of organizational theory called matrix management. In a matrix-managed organization, each worker reports to two bosses. The boss drawn directly above the worker on the org chart is the functionally responsible manager, the person who gives that worker his or her marching orders. And the boss off on the side is the discipline manager, the one who is in charge (in some sense) of all workers with the same or similar skill sets.

- Your Highlight on page 21 | Location 312-315 | Added on Thursday, October 31, 2019 8:57:34 AM

- Your Highlight on page 21 | Location 312-316 | Added on Thursday, October 31, 2019 8:57:41 AM

- Your Highlight on page 21 | Location 312-317 | Added on Thursday, October 31, 2019 8:57:48 AM

This kind of matrix management is particularly appealing when none of the vertical bosses has enough need to justify a person full-time. It’s also handy when outside calls on a worker’s time are varied; let the guy work full-time on his main job but then get matrixed out on an as-needed basis. Companies that adopt this approach think of themselves as agile and infinitely flexible. Task-Switching Penalties The problem is that human workers are not entirely fungible. Even the most dedicated advocate of matrix management will understand that there are limits to how many ways an individual can be divided.

- Your Highlight on page 21 | Location 312-318 | Added on Thursday, October 31, 2019 8:57:52 AM

- Your Highlight on page 22 | Location 325-330 | Added on Thursday, October 31, 2019 10:40:08 AM

Suppose he’s not now in the drawing and layout phase of a project, but is conceptualizing. He is thinking out an ad campaign or concocting an interesting mix of images to convey a point. This rather mysterious activity is essential to his work, but not very well structured; Lamar himself probably couldn’t divide conceptualization into component pieces or impose an order on its subtasks. That means that if he has to stop in the middle, he won’t have a perfectly clean partitioning between work aborted today and restarted tomorrow. To get himself going tomorrow, he may have to go through some of the same mental steps that he’s just been through today. This rework is added to the mechanical components of the task-partitioning penalty.

- Your Highlight on page 25 | Location 374-376 | Added on Thursday, October 31, 2019 10:02:37 PM

To the extent that a hidden task-switching penalty is now using up the resources of an overfragmented organization, the savings have been illusory. Fragmented knowledge workers may look busy, but a lot of their busyness is just thrashing, switching

- Your Highlight on page 25 | Location 374-376 | Added on Thursday, October 31, 2019 10:02:47 PM

- Your Highlight on page 25 | Location 374-376 | Added on Thursday, October 31, 2019 10:02:53 PM

- Your Highlight on page 27 | Location 413-416 | Added on Thursday, October 31, 2019 10:17:33 PM

- Your Highlight on page 27 | Location 413-421 | Added on Thursday, October 31, 2019 10:18:01 PM

Now put yourself in Harry’s place when this happens. He notes that his buffer is emptying. He also notes the pervasive mantra of Hurry Up, Hurry Up, which he interprets to mean Stay Busy. With everyone around him working furiously, he is never going to feel safe if he finishes the last item in his in-box and then waits patiently for someone to feed him something else to work on. You can understand why he might conclude that his job security is not well served by his appearing to be idle. The survival tactic that Harry and others like him hit upon when their buffers begin to empty is to slow down. He slows down only enough to keep his supply of waiting work stable. If he slowed down more than that, he would appear to be a bottleneck, which would focus management on his work rate. So he doesn’t do that; he slows down just enough. Harry is now busy 100 percent of the time, has a healthy buffer of work waiting for him, and is not a bottleneck. This is a recipe for job security; the guy is obviously an ideal employee, judged by his part in helping the Hurry Up organization to work smoothly.

- Your Highlight on page 28 | Location 421-422 | Added on Thursday, October 31, 2019 10:19:12 PM

That’s how the Hurry Up mantra and an increased focus on busyness can end up causing people to slow down. If that’s what you want, go for it.

- Your Highlight on page 29 | Location 440-444 | Added on Thursday, October 31, 2019 10:25:00 PM

You can’t tell Eve to do something because you are the boss and you say it has to be done. You can’t tell her that, because she doesn’t give a hoot for rank. You can’t impose on her goals that don’t make sense to her. If you say, “Get this project done by the end of the day today and also fill out your Skills Inventory Census, ” she will look at you like you’ve gone bonkers. She’ll do the project, because that seems important to her, and the Skills Inventory will end up in the wastebasket. If you burden her with enough tasks that seem pointless to her, she will soon be gone.

- Your Highlight on page 29 | Location 444-445 | Added on Thursday, October 31, 2019 10:25:13 PM

Most of all, you can’t structure her work in a way that gives her no opportunity for growth. Growth is essential to Eve, as essential as her paycheck.

- Your Highlight on page 29 | Location 444-446 | Added on Thursday, October 31, 2019 10:25:29 PM

Most of all, you can’t structure her work in a way that gives her no opportunity for growth. Growth is essential to Eve, as essential as her paycheck. You can no more expect her to work without meaningful challenge than you could expect her to work without salary.

- Your Highlight on page 30 | Location 449-451 | Added on Thursday, October 31, 2019 10:26:37 PM

I had occasion recently to manage a small not-for-profit organization where most of the work was done by volunteers. I noticed from the start that there was almost no way to control the work that these people

- Your Highlight on page 30 | Location 449-451 | Added on Thursday, October 31, 2019 10:26:41 PM

- Your Highlight on page 30 | Location 456-459 | Added on Thursday, October 31, 2019 10:31:41 PM

- Your Highlight on page 30 | Location 456-458 | Added on Thursday, October 31, 2019 10:31:49 PM

- Your Highlight on page 30 | Location 456-461 | Added on Thursday, October 31, 2019 10:32:22 PM

But people never really “do as they’re told.” The difference between for-profit and volunteer organizations is that in the for-profit world people do get paid and so they are willing to give up some control to the boss, to accept at least some direction. But they don’t give up all control. You couldn’t pay them enough for that. This was a great revelation to me as a manager. Without ever coming to grips with how much control workers were willing to give up to their manager, I had always assumed that I nonetheless had it all; that it was my job to control everything and their job to do everything. It took me a long time to see otherwise.

- Your Highlight on page 31 | Location 464-466 | Added on Thursday, October 31, 2019 10:39:22 PM

I replied that 80 percent of a manager’s time might reasonably be spent with his/her workers. However, it seemed a shame to me that these managers thought of that time as meetings; I’d rather they were spending their time one-on-one with their people, or in get-togethers that were so ad hoc as to belie the description “meeting.”

- Your Highlight on page 32 | Location 478-482 | Added on Friday, November 1, 2019 9:00:11 AM

If you buy the notion that Eve is motivated largely by her craving for personal growth, then you’ll understand why she cannot allow herself to be too closely controlled. She will see control as her main growth opportunity. That doesn’t mean you can’t control her somewhat, only that you can’t control her completely. You have to give her some leeway, some opportunity to choose her own directions and make her own mistakes. Mistakes are important here. If she has control over her choices only to the extent that she makes the same ones that you would have made for her, she has no control at all. And of course she’ll know that. There is no fooling Eve.

- Your Highlight on page 32 | Location 483-489 | Added on Friday, November 1, 2019 7:10:28 PM

This question of control comes up primarily in choice of methods to get work done. As designer of the organization under you, you may believe that it is your responsibility to select how each task should be undertaken. Should the financials be presented in a simple spreadsheet or a simulation model? You decide on a spreadsheet. Should working designs and test plans be maintained on the Intranet or circulated on paper? You decide Intranet. Should there be a peer review of each and every work product? You decide yes. But now suppose that Eve and her teammates decide otherwise. Don’t expect for a moment that the authority vested in you by the powers-that-be will be enough to impose your way. These people are in it for growth, and the choices you’re making don’t allow them to grow. That’s why they’re looking to approach the work in a different way.

- Your Highlight on page 32 | Location 491-495 | Added on Friday, November 1, 2019 7:12:56 PM

I offer the following model for control-sharing. If control is in some sense like salary, then control-sharing ought to be (or at least seem to be) proportional to salary. If you have ten people working for you and you make 25 percent more than each of them, then you get 125 “control points,” and they get 100 each. If control is exercised in those proportions—or seems to be—then Eve and all her colleagues will feel that their opportunities for growth are maximized. The trick is how to assure your own requirements of the organization with just those 125 control points. That is not a trivial task. (But

- Your Highlight on page 32 | Location 491-495 | Added on Friday, November 1, 2019 7:13:00 PM

- Your Highlight on page 32 | Location 491-495 | Added on Friday, November 1, 2019 7:13:05 PM

- Your Highlight on page 33 | Location 496-498 | Added on Friday, November 1, 2019 7:13:46 PM

So here’s the paradox of managing Eve: In order to keep control, you have to give it up. You have to use your authority so sparingly that no one notices that it’s being used. You have to create a real sense that control is not completely centralized in your hands, but spread generously over the whole of your organization.

- Your Highlight on page 33 | Location 499-501 | Added on Friday, November 1, 2019 7:14:43 PM

The slack that you thus cut for Eve and her coworkers is not slack in the time sense. This is control slack. But it is every bit as essential to the healthy organization.

- Your Highlight on page 35 | Location 527-528 | Added on Friday, November 1, 2019 7:23:02 PM

Yes, an ability to change is essential. Like many good things, it costs money. How much should it cost? Only the time and energy of a substantial portion of the people who are now 100 percent busy doing work.

- Your Highlight on page 35 | Location 529-533 | Added on Friday, November 1, 2019 7:23:32 PM

Change represents investment. You invest in a change by paying for its two key components: conceptualization (or design) and implementation. This is work that can’t usually be done by an elite corps of change specialists; it needs to be done by the very people who are to be changed. The reason for this is not too complex: Change is not an ad hoc business—organizational death is right around the corner if change happens only when the change specialists get around to it. Ability to change has to be an organic part of the organization. Change has to be going on all the time, everywhere. It needs to be everybody’s business.

- Your Highlight on page 36 | Location 545-548 | Added on Friday, November 1, 2019 7:34:58 PM

Part of the reason for this is that one core capability that a knowledge worker brings to the task is domain knowledge. Whether this person is a designer, product manager, programmer, writer, consultant, or whatever, he/she comes with (1) a set of skills and (2) some explicit knowledge of the area in which skills are to be deployed. The skills alone aren’t enough. Domain knowledge is also required.

- Your Highlight on page 40 | Location 600-605 | Added on Monday, November 4, 2019 9:14:12 AM

The reasons that people leave or don’t leave are as various as the people themselves. However, a common feature of exit interviews is a sense that the departing person felt used. This leads to a disturbing paradox: The more successful a company is in extracting every bit of capacity from its workers, the more it exposes itself to turnover and attendant human capital loss. On the other hand, when people stay on, they are often motivated by the lure of personal growth. The organization’s agility, its healthy capability to take on change, is an important factor in supplying opportunities for such growth to the individual.

- Your Highlight on page 41 | Location 623-625 | Added on Monday, November 4, 2019 9:22:39 AM

What I call bankruptcy of inventiveness is often the result of a failure to set aside the resources necessary to let invention happen. The principal resource needed for invention is slack. When companies can’t invent, it’s usually because their people are too damn busy.

- Your Highlight on page 44 | Location 671-675 | Added on Monday, November 4, 2019 12:13:29 PM

THE HURRY UP ORGANIZATION is under constant pressure. You, in your role as manager, certainly contribute to this pressure, either consciously or unconsciously. After all, you are under a lot of pressure yourself, so why not pass it down to the people below you on the hierarchy? Similarly, to the extent that you show yourself to be accepting of pressure and able to thrive on it, you’re applying more pressure on your peer managers as well. They can’t let themselves be perceived as less up for the challenge than you are.

- Your Highlight on page 45 | Location 688-688 | Added on Monday, November 4, 2019 12:14:45 PM

Incentives for knowledge workers are, to my mind, a sad indicator of management that just doesn’t know how to manage

- Your Highlight on page 46 | Location 692-694 | Added on Monday, November 4, 2019 12:16:05 PM

- Your Highlight on page 46 | Location 692-695 | Added on Monday, November 4, 2019 12:16:22 PM

Such incentives don’t really encourage any kind of different behavior in the people they target. But they do increase pressure by sending a loud and clear message that management wants everybody to get cracking. But wait a minute. How can they increase pressure without changing behavior? Pressure up and behavior unchanged? Is that even possible? It is. That’s my point. Most of the things you do to increase pressure don’t change people’s behavior in any meaningful way.

- Your Highlight on page 46 | Location 703-703 | Added on Tuesday, November 5, 2019 8:36:47 AM

An increasingly common bit of our organizational folklore

- Your Highlight on page 46 | Location 701-705 | Added on Tuesday, November 5, 2019 8:37:30 AM

As you consider moving the lever one way or another, I have a hunch that there is a tiny voice somewhere inside your head telling you to push the damn thing all the way down to the floor and leave it there forever. This is not, strictly speaking, your voice. Rather, it is the corporate culture speaking through you. An increasingly common bit of our organizational folklore holds that pressure improves performance and that maximum performance can occur only in the presence of maximum pressure. This idea, though deeply embedded in our culture, doesn’t stand up to examination in the light of day.

- Your Highlight on page 48 | Location 735-736 | Added on Tuesday, November 5, 2019 8:42:27 AM

“People under time pressure don’t think faster.” —Tim Lister

- Your Highlight on page 52 | Location 793-794 | Added on Tuesday, November 5, 2019 10:31:13 AM

Overcommitment is not just an accident. Companies sometimes take purposeful steps to build an overcommitment ethic into their managers and into the corporate culture.

- Your Highlight on page 58 | Location 883-888 | Added on Friday, November 8, 2019 10:42:36 AM

The “long into the night” example is perhaps too extreme. A more typical overtime regime is something like this: ten- or eleven-hour days Monday through Friday plus significant weekend time, all of it amounting to sixty-plus hours for the week. In this scheme, you may get a full night’s sleep every night. It’s your personal life that pays the price for the extra time given to the company. Gasping, in this example, is the increasing pressure that your personal life begins to apply: strain on the marriage, kids acting out, eventually a sense of being used. Again, corporate culture requires you to conceal the gasping, but it’s there. It takes its toll in lost work hours, ineffectively spent time, reduced quality, and people tossing in the towel to search for more sensible jobs.

- Your Highlight on page 60 | Location 909-914 | Added on Friday, November 8, 2019 10:55:12 AM

There are four reasons why overtime hurts enough to offset the effect of the added hours. These are the invariable side effects of extended overtime: Reduced quality Personnel burnout Increased turnover of staff Ineffective use of time during normal hours

- Your Highlight on page 62 | Location 950-953 | Added on Tuesday, November 12, 2019 10:51:02 AM

Only by not thinking about this at all can you persist in the comfortable illusion that overtime extracted from employees will have no effect on turnover. When companies conduct exit interviews of their departing employees, overtime is a frequently cited cause of the departure. When people feel used, when the fragile balance of their lives is upset by increasing pressure on their families, they’d be crazy not to think of moving on.

- Your Highlight on page 65 | Location 987-988 | Added on Tuesday, November 12, 2019 4:51:27 PM

When managers are overworked, they’re doing something other than management; the more they allow themselves to be overworked, the less real management gets done.

- Your Highlight on page 66 | Location 1004-1005 | Added on Tuesday, November 12, 2019 6:56:09 PM

- Your Highlight on page 66 | Location 1004-1008 | Added on Tuesday, November 12, 2019 6:56:25 PM

This leads to an unfortunate management dynamic: Reported productivity can apparently be inflated by goading workers into working overtime; managers who extract more overtime from their workers look like more effective managers. I say this is an apparent inflation of productivity, because the worker is almost certainly less productive during all those extra hours. So we have an approach to productivity enhancement that leads directly to productivity reduction. This may not be immediately evident because the work produced by knowledge workers is not easy to measure. But suppose for a moment that it were …

- Your Highlight on page 67 | Location 1018-1019 | Added on Tuesday, November 12, 2019 7:00:37 PM

For most knowledge work, we have no objective way to measure an individual worker’s meaningful output during a day.

- Your Highlight on page 67 | Location 1020-1024 | Added on Tuesday, November 12, 2019 7:01:34 PM

In the absence of work measurement, a common technique is to assume that real work is a direct linear function of time present. This leads to a truly pathological definition of productivity: It’s not uncommon for organizations to make an explicit calculation of this “productivity” and hold it up in front of managers as a performance indicator.

- Your Highlight on page 68 | Location 1031-1035 | Added on Tuesday, November 12, 2019 7:04:13 PM

When people put in lots of overtime over an extended period of time, their net effectiveness is not just decreased during the extra hours; they begin to limp during the main body of the workday as well, due to built-up fatigue and reduced motivation. That can lead to less total work accomplished in a twelve-hour day than would have been accomplished in an eight-hour day. I made that point in Chapter 9. My additional point here is that the perverse definition of productivity based on the fiction of ignored overtime hours can only increase the likelihood of lowered performance.

- Your Highlight on page 72 | Location 1095-1096 | Added on Wednesday, November 13, 2019 9:17:56 AM

How many of your high-priced managers and engineers and developers and designers are busy being their own clerks as you read these words? How much of your own time is spent that way? I hope you’re asking yourself, “What’s wrong with this picture?”

- Your Highlight on page 73 | Location 1108-1111 | Added on Wednesday, November 13, 2019 9:21:55 AM

In corporations, First Law abuse is a direct result of trying to manage without benefit of talent. Talented managers are largely immune to this stuff; they’re all sense organ, constantly attuned to the effect their leadership is having on their people, constantly adjusting and refining their focus for maximum effect. If something isn’t working, they stop doing it and try something else. Managers without such talent find themselves relying on formulas and “principles” of management

- Your Highlight on page 73 | Location 1108-1113 | Added on Wednesday, November 13, 2019 9:22:16 AM

- Your Highlight on page 73 | Location 1118-1121 | Added on Wednesday, November 13, 2019 10:32:17 AM

Looking back over the worst failures of my own and my colleagues’ management careers, I’m struck by the fact that there is one innocent-seeming sin common to them all. It’s something we’ve all done at one time or another. You’ve done it yourself. Second Law of Bad Management Put yourself in as your own utility infielder.

- Your Highlight on page 74 | Location 1124-1126 | Added on Wednesday, November 13, 2019 10:33:03 AM

gone. All the rest of your people are busy as hell; you don’t want to further burden them with another task, particularly not one that upper management found to be of so little importance that they “trimmed ” the person who was doing it. Yet that “whatever” still has to be done. Oh well, you add it to your own burden and do it yourself. On the org chart we now see:

- Your Highlight on page 74 | Location 1124-1126 | Added on Wednesday, November 13, 2019 10:33:07 AM

All the rest of your people are busy as hell; you don’t want to further burden them with another task, particularly not one that upper management found to be of so little importance that they “trimmed ” the person who was doing it. Yet that “whatever” still has to be done. Oh well, you add it to your own burden and do it yourself. On the org chart we now see:

- Your Highlight on page 74 | Location 1130-1131 | Added on Wednesday, November 13, 2019 10:33:35 AM

Assigning yourself to an unfilled position in your domain means that you unassign yourself (at least partially) from the task of managing that domain.

- Your Highlight on page 75 | Location 1139-1147 | Added on Wednesday, November 13, 2019 10:42:03 AM

The little jokes wouldn’t be funny enough to tell if there weren’t at least a germ of truth behind them. The germ of truth is this: Managers don’t perform any of the services or make any of the products that our customers pay for. It’s the people who report to them that do this work. So each time a manager intervenes in a worker’s day, it distracts that worker temporarily from revenue-producing activities. The distraction is probably useful in the long run (because, for example, it effects some new way of doing the work), but in the short run it distracts. In the short term it’s just a bother. The lore may be everywhere, but that doesn’t mean you have to buy into it yourself. To do your job correctly and well, you need to foster an attitude that is quite the opposite. You need to understand that management (the management that you provide) is utterly essential. It is. Good management is the lifeblood of the healthy corporate body. Getting rid of it to save cost is like losing weight by giving blood.

- Your Highlight on page 76 | Location 1154-1155 | Added on Wednesday, November 13, 2019 10:46:54 AM

The challenges of management are daunting: They lead us into the scarily intangible world of people relations, motivation, societal formation, conflict, and conflict resolution.

- Your Highlight on page 77 | Location 1166-1169 | Added on Wednesday, November 13, 2019 10:50:34 AM

We all grapple with Second Law temptations at some time in our management careers. To rise above them, we need to face up to an important truth: Management is hard, and not because there is so much work to do (an overworked manager is almost certainly doing work he/she shouldn’t be doing). Management is hard because the skills are inherently difficult to master. Your mastery of them will affect your organization more than anything going on under you. Running away from the challenge doesn’t help.

- Your Highlight on page 78 | Location 1193-1198 | Added on Wednesday, November 13, 2019 10:54:31 AM

- Your Highlight on page 78 | Location 1193-1202 | Added on Wednesday, November 13, 2019 10:54:49 AM

Among the characteristics of the Culture of Fear organization are these: 1. It is not safe to say certain things (e.g., “I have serious doubts that this quota can be met”). And truth is no excuse for saying them. 2. In fact, being right in your doubts proves that you must be the reason that the fondest wishes of those above you did not come true. 3. Goals are set so aggressively that there is virtually no chance of achieving them. 4. Power is allowed to trump common sense. 5. Anyone can be abused and abased for a failure to knuckle under. 6. The people who are fired are, on average, more competent than the people who aren’t. 7. The surviving managers are a particularly angry lot. Everyone is terrified of crossing them.

- Your Highlight on page 81 | Location 1240-1242 | Added on Thursday, November 14, 2019 11:17:08 AM

It’s tempting to say that overstressed organizations are always understaffed; that that’s where all the stress comes from in the first place. It’s tempting, but it isn’t entirely so. There are also situations where overstaffing is the problem, where overstaffing is both the cause of the stress and part of our response to it.

- Your Highlight on page 86 | Location 1310-1312 | Added on Friday, November 15, 2019 11:46:57 PM

Healthy companies know that they have to allow people to fail without assessing blame. They have to do that or else no one will take on anything that’s not a sure bet. Healthy companies know that, but Culture of Fear companies do not. In a Culture of Fear company, failure must be rewarded with punishment.

- Your Highlight on page 87 | Location 1325-1328 | Added on Friday, November 15, 2019 11:59:46 PM

- Your Highlight on page 87 | Location 1325-1329 | Added on Saturday, November 16, 2019 12:00:09 AM

The chemistry of Culture of Fear organizations seems to call for a fixed minimum amount of blame. In some companies, this minimum may even be written into policy. Consider, for example, G.E.’s policy that all managers be evaluated every year and the bottom 10 percent be fired. Prospering in such an environment can take two forms: Either you have to do relatively well, or some of your peers have to do relatively badly. Any failure by managers beside you on the org chart thus has the effect of reducing pressure on you. In such an environment, there is a natural inclination to view with suspicion anything that would constitute a big win for any other manager.

- Your Highlight on page 88 | Location 1343-1349 | Added on Saturday, November 16, 2019 12:38:12 AM

You may understand why Buyer would enter into such a contract, but what about Seller? In order to understand Seller’s motives, we need to look well below the corporate level to the subordinate organization that will perform the work. Under the gun to show profit and growth (perhaps in a weakening market), this organization is encouraged to best its competition by offering lower price or earlier delivery. Someone within the organization is responsible for getting the work done, for actually building the Somethingorother on time and on budget. He/she tries to say the unpalatable truth that the time and money allocated for the work are plain insufficient. In a Culture of Fear organization, such doubts are stifled or shouted down. “Don’t tell me it can’t be done, goddammit. It will be done. If you can’t do it, I’ll get

- Your Highlight on page 88 | Location 1343-1349 | Added on Saturday, November 16, 2019 12:38:22 AM

- Your Highlight on page 88 | Location 1343-1349 | Added on Saturday, November 16, 2019 12:38:26 AM

- Your Highlight on page 91 | Location 1381-1385 | Added on Monday, November 18, 2019 1:01:01 AM

A good contract requires slack. If a vendor commits to × by a given date, you act to your own peril to accept that commitment unless you can see that the vendor has left itself sufficient slack. If there are two competing vendors with different prices and the difference is explained by the fact that the cheaper one has cut all slack, then you court the disaster of litigation by choosing the low bidder. Similarly, if you are bidder, you need to know there is sufficient slack in the contract terms to cover reasonably expected risks.

- Your Highlight on page 93 | Location 1414-1421 | Added on Monday, November 18, 2019 8:59:47 AM

The standards we depend on to give us choice in our lives are all product standards. Almost without exception, they are used to constrain the interface characteristic of a product, not the way that product is built. So Fuji is obliged to respect the ISO standard for size and shape of its film containers, for film width and light sensitivity, sprocket hole positions, edge smoothness, and a thousand other characteristics of the product. If they don’t, they can’t sell that film as 35mm, ASA400, or whatever. The standards do not tell Fuji how to make the film, only how the product has to present itself after it’s made. The particular recipe for the film—the series of steps it passes through on the production line—is left entirely to the maker. If Fuji decides to spray-paint the markings onto the canister before the film is inserted, while Kodak prints its markings onto its canister after insertion, that’s their business. The standard doesn’t touch on the how-tos of film making;

- Your Highlight on page 93 | Location 1414-1421 | Added on Monday, November 18, 2019 8:59:53 AM

- Your Highlight on page 96 | Location 1470-1471 | Added on Monday, November 18, 2019 2:17:19 PM

When the new automation is in place, there is less total work to be done by the human worker, but what work is left is harder. That is the paradox of automation: It

- Your Highlight on page 96 | Location 1470-1471 | Added on Monday, November 18, 2019 2:17:24 PM

When the new automation is in place, there is less total work to be done by the human worker, but what work is left is harder. That is the paradox of automation:

- Your Highlight on page 96 | Location 1470-1473 | Added on Monday, November 18, 2019 2:17:47 PM

When the new automation is in place, there is less total work to be done by the human worker, but what work is left is harder. That is the paradox of automation: It makes the work harder, not easier. After all, it was the easy stuff that got absorbed into the machine, so what’s left is, almost by definition, fuzzier, less mechanical, and more complex. Whatever standard is now introduced to govern the work will dictate (often in elaborate detail) how the few remaining

- Your Highlight on page 96 | Location 1470-1473 | Added on Monday, November 18, 2019 2:17:50 PM

- 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?

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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?

- 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.”

- 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.

- 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.”

- 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.

- 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.

- 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

- 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

- Your Highlight on page 114 | Location 1744-1750 | Added on Tuesday, November 26, 2019 8:31:31 AM

- 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.

- 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.

- Your Highlight on page 115 | Location 1761-1764 | Added on Wednesday, November 27, 2019 7:59:54 AM

- Your Highlight on page 115 | Location 1761-1764 | Added on Wednesday, November 27, 2019 8:00:00 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.

- 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.

- 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

- 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

- 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.’”

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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

책/Slack

Slack