The no excuses culture

I think that successs had nothing to do with excuses and a lot more to do with "my groups inside of marketing had become dumping grounds for projects from both inside and outside of marketing – with everything being “priority one.” [...] We quickly put in a capacity/priority planning process."

I bet a hat that it was primary the prioritization and planning process that did the trick.

I've heard this from a lot of business-management types, but I've always felt they have the causality backwards.

It's not that "reasons don't matter", so therefore you can know your job is now in the executive suite.

It's rather that once you're an executive, you are (presumably) granted enough power and authority to actually fix problems on your own initiative, before they become visible to the people above you. So if a problem becomes visible to the people above you, it means you didn't exercise all that power and authority at your disposal to prevent that.

I think this causal direction is more useful, because it suggests that there sometimes still are "reasons" that can matter as justifications for failure—as long as those "reasons" are things outside of the reach of the executive's power+authority. For example, a COO won't usually be fired if an political/military emergency grounds all flights and so nobody's stuff gets delivered—because there's nothing they really could have done about that, no amount of planning that would have circumlocuted the problem.

This was a good post and an interesting idea with some nice conclusions.

One of the commenters, however, nailed it and got to the heart of the difficulty: getting people to do what they say they will do. Period. Full stop.

You can wrap excuses, or culture, or other corporate vocabulary around the matter, but it boils down to that fundamental thing of people doing what they are asked and delivering what they say they will.

Managing people is difficult and if there's an organization who has had more experience organizing people to execute objectives than most anyone else, it's the military. They are damned good at it and there exists a lot of manuals and writings to this end.

The commentor brought up an essay from 1899 that is still brought up in today's military training. It is clearer and more to the point of the fundamental need of people who can do what you ask and deliver what they say.

It's only three pages and it's wonderful. A Message to Garcia by Elbert Hubbard:

http://www.benning.army.mil/infantry/199th/ocs/content/pdf/m...

There's an extraordinary amount of laziness and entitlement in today's businesses; technology is no exception. It is truly rarer and rarer to find someone who will simply: "carry a message to Garcia."

Having worked at a few places in my career now, I've found two dominant styles of management. Either you trust your team, listen to their "excuses", and try to help them unblock themselves (and come up with learnings to increase future velocity), or you _don't_ trust your team and constantly hold the stick above their heads. The former style lends itself to cautious team growth and views each employee as having a valuable skillset, emphasizing low churn. The latter seems to engender a hypergrowth strategy, where employees are seen as "resources" rather than important cornerstones of the company.

Consider the following. Asking for help ends up blocking other employees _also_ laboring under their own deadlines, which incentivizes most employees to ignore requests for help.

I'm of two minds on this.

As many of the commenters on the original piece note, the idea of a "no excuses culture" will be familiar to anyone who's familiar with the culture of the (U.S., anyway) military, and generally speaking it works quite well there. It helps cut through B.S. and keep everyone focused on the idea that results are the thing that matter, which is important when results can literally mean the difference between life and death. And while it can sound to an outsider like a cruel standard, I personally found my exposure to it freeing -- it means not having to deal with the blame-seeking and post-hoc litigation of small mistakes that we all have to struggle with every day in other contexts. So in that respect, I'm all for it.

The thing is, though, in the context of military culture "no excuses" isn't a stand-alone principle the way it's presented here. It's embedded with a bunch of other, complimentary principles that help sand off its roughest edges.

An example would be the principle that responsibility flows uphill: leaders are responsible for failures of their units, even in cases where the failure is entirely due to mistakes by subordinates -- mistakes that they may not even have known were being made. (Because why didn't the leader know those mistakes were being made? It's their job to train their people to do the right things, and to make sure they're actually doing them.)

This compliments the "no excuses" idea, because it limits its usefulness as a tool for powerful people to push ones farther down the food chain to do unethical things. You're responsible for the things your people do, so there's a strong incentive to make sure not just that they get results, but that they do so in ways that you would be comfortable being judged by.

Without that, "no excuses" becomes a kind of blind eye standard -- "get results, I don't care how." Which can put immense pressure on the person on the receiving end of that directive to cut corners, fudge evidence and cross ethical lines if they have to in order to get those results. And if they do, the leader can then feign innocence: "I never told them to do those horrible things!" Well, yeah, but you put them in a position where the horrible things were they only things they could realistically do. You set them up to fail.

So while I applaud the general idea, I worry that in the absence of complimentary values "from now on showing up with an excuse the day the project is due will cost them their job" becomes just one more way for bad managers to push blame that should rightly go to their own incompetence down down the org chart.