The no excuses culture
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The no excuses culture
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Re: The no excuses culture
#2This story being about a marketing department might seem like it's not applicable to a software company, but when it comes down to it, we still break down our work into bite-sized stories that can/should be accomplished in a timeframe that's estimated ahead of time. Some shops have more nebulous tasks because they've never done something before, I get that. But for the build the thing we know how to stuff? We should be able to deliver consistently. It comes down to your ability to break down the work into small enough pieces such that you know how long it will take. If you don't know how long it will take, it's not broken down enough.
Now to play devils advocate - I'm generally in favor of carrot not stick.
Re: The no excuses culture
#3"Excuses are the nails used to build the house of failure," or so the saying goes. A teacher used to repeat this phrase to any grade-school students who failed to turn in homework. He didn't care what the excuses were; no amount of excuse can undo the passage of time and the truancy of students.
The bulk of the post is about compensating for the lack of excuses with compassion and teamwork, and avoiding creating a culture of blame. This is important. Excuses hide accountability, but blame makes communication impossible.
Re: The no excuses culture
#4I feel a little skeptical. One of the hardest and important parts of management is maintaining trust between you and your team. It's very easy to communicate something in a way that's misunderstood, and kills the morale. What then happens is that few people leave, and overall productivity of your organization plunges.
Note that he spent about a third of the post explaining `I didn’t mean “deliver or else.”`. It's an indication that it's hard to pull off.
I have no opinion on this this strategy as such (i.e. I think it sounds pretty good), but please don't try this in your org unless you are very experienced, and feel confident that you can communicate it well.
Re: The no excuses culture
#5"Excuses are the nails used to build the house of failure," or so the saying goes. A teacher used to repeat this phrase to any grade-school students who failed to turn in homework. He didn't care what the excuses were; no amount of excuse can undo the passage of time and the truancy of students. The bulk of the post is about compensating for the lack of excuses with compassion and teamwork, and avoiding creating a cu…
Never did my homework.
I'd rather stayed at school an hour longer than doing homework in the afternoon.
Lowered my grade in every class, but my free time was totally worth it.
In the end I still got to study computer science, like I always wanted, so I don't see their point in retrospect...
Re: The no excuses culture
#6This story being about a marketing department might seem like it's not applicable to a software company, but when it comes down to it, we still break down our work into bite-sized stories that can/should be accomplished in a timeframe that's estimated ahead of time. Some shops have more nebulous tasks because they've never done something before, I get that. But for the build the thing we know how to stuff? We should…
Could you elaborate what you mean by your last line?
I think firing someone for it once is on the harsh side, but if someone repeatedly doesn't share key information, how can you keep working with them?
Re: The no excuses culture
#7"[Steve] Jobs imagines his garbage regularly not being emptied in his office, and when he asks the janitor why, he gets an excuse: The locks have been changed, and the janitor doesn't have a key. This is an acceptable excuse coming from someone who empties trash bins for a living. The janitor gets to explain why something went wrong. Senior people do not. "When you're the janitor," Jobs has repeatedly told incoming VPs, "reasons matter." He continues: "Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering." That "Rubicon," he has said, "is crossed when you become a VP."
https://www.macstories.net/news/inside-apple-reveals-steve-j...
Re: The no excuses culture
#8Sounds very similar to one of my old bosses. He had one rule and one only: no surprises.
Soon as anything is a potential issue raise it, find a mitigation and move on. Simple and works surprisingly well both on an individual basis and at scale.
Re: The no excuses culture
#9As usual with business people, the author seems to believe their [simplified strategy] (no excuses) is what caused the outcome they describe. I think it's more likely from the article that the organization simply became more efficient as a result of said "no excuses culture", but it isn't actually the lack of excuses that did much. Why isn't it OK to just say "it's complicated; here's what we did" instead of trying to reduce it into some meaningless phrase.
I think this pretty much says it:
> By accountable I meant, “We agreed on a delivery date, and between now and the delivery date, it’s OK if you ask for help because you’re stuck, or something happened outside of your control. But do not walk into my office the day something is due and give me an excuse. It will cost you your job.” That kind of accountable.
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What's an excuse? Most dictionaries define it as some variant of "justifying" an event. Some editorialize and use words such as: apologizing for, or making light of. Let's just take the essence, justification.
Therefore, a "no excuses culture" is a culture in which there's no justification for events. Such a culture will likely fail in the long run as it fails to acknowledge the blind spot it's purposely ignoring. I doubt any business people would be proud of not knowing why they're missing targets...
Re: The no excuses culture
#10It seems that original problem was that importance of deadlines was not communicated to the team. For example: "the January ad had to be moved into February because my graphic artist was sick, but I didn’t tell you because I assumed it was OK." does not sound like an excuse to me. It sounds like the person genuinely did not seen the event as important and may be surprised over this being big deal suddenly.
It sounds to me that previous management did not valued deadlines and did not even made deadlines possible, so naturally employees did things previous management valued.