Organizational busy work tends to expand to fill the working day.
Some of the most flowery praise you hear on the subject of teams is only hypocrisy. Managers learn to talk a good game about teams even when they’re secretly threatened by the whole concept.
The more you focus on control, the more likely you’re working on a project that’s striving to deliver something of relatively minor value.
Quality takes time and reduces quantity, so it makes you, in a sense, less efficient. The efficiency-optimized organization recognizes quality as its enemy. That’s why many corporate Quality Programs are really Quality Reduction Programs in disguise.
Learning is limited by an organization’s ability to keep its people.
The business we’re in is more sociological than technological, more dependent on workers’ abilities to communicate with each other than their abilities to communicate with machines.
When companies can’t invent, it’s usually because their people are too damn busy.
It’s possible to make an organization more efficient without making it better. That’s what happens when you drive out slack.
Ownership of the standard should be in the hands of those who do the work.
Whether you call it a “team” or an “ensemble” or a “harmonious work group” is not what matters; what matters is helping all parties understand that the success of the individual is tied irrevocably to the success of the whole.
What seemed to be happening was that the change itself wasn’t as important as the act of changing. People were charmed by differentness, they liked the attention, they were intrigued by novelty.
Good management is the lifeblood of the healthy corporate body. Getting rid of it to save cost is like losing weight by giving blood.
As long as people tend to define themselves at least partially in terms of the work they do, any change to that work, its procedures and modes, is likely to have self-definitional importance to them. This can lead to surprising amounts of change resistance.
Rooms without a view are like prisons for the people who have to stay in them.
In the most highly stressed projects, people at all levels talk about the schedule being “aggressive, ” or even “highly aggressive.” In my experience, projects in which the schedule is commonly termed aggressive or highly aggressive invariably turn out to be fiascoes. “Aggressive schedule,” I’ve come to suspect, is a kind of code phrase – understood implicitly by all involved – for a schedule that is absurd, that has no chance at all of being met.
Overworked managers are doing things they shouldn’t be doing.
You may be able to kick people to make them active, but not to make them creative, inventive, and thoughtful.
The statistics about reading are particularly discouraging: The average software developer, for example, doesn’t own a single book on the subject of his or her work, and hasn’t ever read one.
When the office environment is frustrating enough, people look for a place to hide out. They book the conference rooms or head for the library or wander off for coffee and just don’t come back. No, they are not meeting for secret romance or plotting political coups; they are hiding out to work. The good news here is that your people really do need to feel the accomplishment of work completed. They will go to great extremes to make that happen.
Risk management is not the same as worrying about your project.
When stress is the problem, slack is the solution.