Nonlinear Enterprise - Latest Comments

Re: Hire and promote first on integrity

joelexing — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 10:59:39 -0000

Getting the right personnel is no joke. If you find the perfect group, keep it right.

Re: Hire and promote first on integrity

Diks — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 07:14:58 -0000

Very informative article. Thanks for sharing.

Regards.

Re: Living up to the charter

selfstorage — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 01:54:01 -0000

You have a great blog, was wondering why have you not been updating here! It's been more than a year now!

Dave

Re: Hire and promote first on integrity

ozzinjury3 — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 04:11:31 -0000

this really was a very helpful article, thanks a lot for sharing mate, I do hope everything went out fine.

Re: Enterprise optimization built in

webrochester1 — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 05:57:47 -0000

you really had great insights, thanks a lot for giving us ideas and reminding us things that we should do in our enterprise...

Re: Hire and promote first on integrity

Indie — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 04:17:53 -0000

Thanks for this sharing tips this would be helpful to the companies in choosing their employees for promotional purposes.

Re: Hire and promote first on integrity

hadouken — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 13:25:10 -0000

Brilliant presentation, with the order of views evenly arranged. Those are really words to keep in mind and heart. I'm looking forward to attend more and more summits like these one.

Re: Big Bang adoption of a new methodology

cez03 — Wed, 13 May 2009 02:37:38 -0000

nice post, and I even enjoyed watching the video..

Re: Killing the enterprise by decree

cesaridrovo — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 23:22:22 -0000

I totally agree Jason. Every time this action is taken in the industry (and we're still talking mainly about our observation of Investment Banking IT, I guess) it has a negative effect for that reason. I share your view that the ones who leave end up getting more elsewhere. Even when the ones who replace them appear to cost less, they are disproportionately less productive so the value for your money drops significantly. If you are lucky they eventually grow into the job - just in time for the cycle to complete and another sweeping 10% cut...

Smoke and mirrors should be outlawed both as as management methodology and as an accounting practice. I wonder if senior management or the executive board or whoever comes up with these decisions are blissfully unaware that the net effect of this short term accounting fix is in fact to hurt the company.

Re: Killing the enterprise by decree

cesaridrovo — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 23:15:01 -0000

Thanks for offering the contractors' point of view Neil. That is another very good example. The bigger the company, the more tempting it must be to use this bullying tactic which says "we're big and you're small and there's nothing you can do about it".

There might be a number of underlying assumptions at work, such as:
- A 10% cut is too small to trigger a mass departure.
- The change will be perceived as industry-wide because everyone is hit at once.
- By making it indiscriminate contractors and managers won't feel targeted.
- A 10% cut is better than losing one's job, in other words: "misery loves company".
- Middle managers will welcome not having to deal with conflict resolution because they are encouraged to legitimately claim it's out of their control.
- Those managers couldn't be trusted to make the necessary cuts anyway because they are consumed by empire-building.

The total lack of respect implied by this action is also pretty insulting as a manager, so I suspect those who stay are the ones who would welcome having no participation in such decisions.

Re: Killing the enterprise by decree

Jason — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 18:07:11 -0000

I lived through that too. It seemed faintly amusing at the time. There were these guys who had been around for years, happy in what they were doing. They knew the company procedures back to front, took very little effort to manage, and had no idea how far they had fallen behind rate-wise over the previous few (millennium bug & internet bubble) years. So off they all went - to better paid jobs. And they had to be replaced with much more expensive people, whey knew so much less.

Whilst we may giggle at stupid bureaucracy, it was a worrying feeling that if the company was doing this in the UK for no real justifiable reason at the time, how many of the other senior decisions were being similarly misapplied. I was glad I did not have a bonus for it to affect.

Re: Killing the enterprise by decree

Neil — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 17:11:01 -0000

The attraction of the "one size fits all" policy is that it is administratively simple - it can therefore be sold to the decision makers as efficient whereas the truth is that it simply masks the lack of good managerial skills available within organizations.

To illustrate, another example from the contracting world (investment banking clients) where the current flavor of the day is for organizations to issue a take it or leave it 10% across the board rate cut. Inevitably this leads to the retention of the less skilled, motivated and mobile resources who will simply accept the policy - result being a lower overall skills base to draw on at the time when a more flexible and agile pool is required.

Still, at least management did not have to make any real decisions ... except which limb to aim for this time ...

Re: Productivity booster-pack

cesaridrovo — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 12:57:42 -0000

We will get an opportunity to ask Salesforce.com about the "jelling" impact of their Big-Bang adoption of Agile on the overall enterprise. They will be presenting on this topic at the BayAPLN event on July 15th.

Their experience would influence my expectations on what could be achieved by targeted initiatives like the one I'm suggesting on this post.

Re: Productivity booster-pack

Denis — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 11:49:48 -0000

Team jelling is a well documented phenomon and productivity booster.

Are you implying that whole companies would jell ?

I would like to see proof of that as it seems to be the goal of some of the latest developments of Scrum for instance.

Re: What is a Nonlinear Enterprise?

cesaridrovo — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 12:53:27 -0000

Hello Sue, and welcome to Nonlinear Enterprise.
Your own blog has a number of things that complement nicely what I'm trying to do here. I hope you will continue to drop by and help guide me to keep this interesting and useful.
César.

Re: What is a Nonlinear Enterprise?

Sue Massey — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 23:30:55 -0000

Just wanted to say HI. I found your blog a few days ago on Technorati and have been reading it over the past few days.

Re: Hire and promote first on integrity

Denis — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 00:22:35 -0000

Trust goes way beyond than integrity and loyalty ;)

You can entrust most people with a cash register without fear of theft but integrity will never be enough to entrust a passenger airplane.

Re: Hire and promote first on integrity

cesaridrovo — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 00:08:55 -0000

Thanks for your comment Denis.

I guess you had to be there and I may have failed to match Pollyanna's practised delivery. She expanded on this with her interpretation of Dee Hock's views by saying that it was absolutely essential to be able to trust your people. If you don't trust them, be it to do the job right or even not to steal from you, then they should probably be removed or not hired in the first place, and the other attributes don't really matter in this case.

In every-day situations such as software engineering, there are those who will refuse to develop functionality they suspect supports illegal or even dubious activity unless the legal department is brought in on the decision. These are often also prepared to lose their jobs to stand by their ethics and sleep well at night. There are others who accept such a request thinking that either no-one will ever know or that if found out they can hide behind the excuse that they were following requirements. I know which of these two I want to work with.

When we exclude such boundary cases then I agree with you that the focus should be on the balance of qualities. Even more than that, the selection needs to pay due consideration for the balance of the team and the enterprise.

Re: Hire and promote first on integrity

Denis — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 23:39:28 -0000

First let me congratulate you for opening this blog and say I am happy to put the first comment.

Among other things in the linked article I will touch on the substance and form dichotomy which is less than efficient and typically ill advised (see what I wrote on this). I would even say it contradicts the idea of getting rid of old ideas.

Further the concept of the 'right person' is downright wrong ! As is the idea that the qualities of a person (including integrity) can be ordered. They all need to mix to form a balanced individual that you will enjoy working with !