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The no excuses culture

steveblank.com

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Re: The no excuses culture

#41

Post by sdiupIGPWEfh »

Mz wrote: post #23
derefr wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No, I think the OP is correct. My father and ex husband were career military and I was a full time mom. Both the military and parenting have this in common: You may not be in control of certain things, nonetheless, you are responsible for the outcome. In other words, kids are autonomous beings and may do things the parent does not want them to do. When the law says money is owed due to the child breaking something, t…

Now imagine you as a parent are robbed of any authority over your children: not even so much as calling time-outs, sending them to their room, groundings, suspending electronic devices, or whatever. You're as good as an officer who can't discipline his own troops. Responsibility for outcomes when you have no control at all is no way to run a family, a military unit, or a business, yet many businesses happily create such situations and expect us to suck it up.

Re: The no excuses culture

#42

Post by xrd »

At first I was really resistant to reading this. "No excuses" sounds like something someone who has never been responsible for impossible engineering deadlines gets to say. But, I really like the way Blank defines it as "be in communication and ask for help so there are no surprises." That is great: I often find myself avoiding being in communication because I'm sure someone will offer uncomfortable solutions. But, those are the difference between a mediocre organization and a superb one.

Re: The no excuses culture

#43

Post by cj »

xrd wrote: post #42

At first I was really resistant to reading this. "No excuses" sounds like something someone who has never been responsible for impossible engineering deadlines gets to say. But, I really like the way Blank defines it as "be in communication and ask for help so there are no surprises." That is great: I often find myself avoiding being in communication because I'm sure someone will offer uncomfortable solutions. But, t…

+1 - I think this is key: "be in communication and ask for help so there are no surprises."

The title of the article would probably be more palatable as "No surprises" since by "No excuses" he really means no bullshit excuses a day before the deadline. Then again, an article titled "No surprises" probably wouldn't have gotten this many upvotes.

Re: The no excuses culture

#44

Post by tzakrajs »

Sounds to me like the real problem is that Steve Blank does not have a system to get enough context from individual contributors to know that a project is slipping well before the deadline. This is a management problem being cast as a individual contributor problem (we need to fire those lazy, incompetent employees who don't ask for help when they should /s), what a bizarre inversion of reasoning.

Edit: Management should be the ones held accountable for projects slipping their deadlines. The individual contributors don't just auto-assemble into on-time results.

Re: The no excuses culture

#45

Post by icebraining »

draw_down wrote: post #21

Sounds great, if the boss is not somehow magically delivered from being a responsible party, and as long as the boss's reasons for not meeting commitments are not considered somehow different and therefore "not excuses", i.e., acceptable.

Yeah, that's a great way to destroy moral, ie, have your underlings hate your guts. Parents do this kind of crap to their kids all the time, too, then wonder why them don't get respected.

Re: The no excuses culture

#46

Post by getpost »

cj wrote: post #27
kristianc wrote: post #19

This is a piece of positioning. It's not so much Blank giving any serious solution to the solution of 'no accountability' as him saying 'look at how tough and uncompromising I am.' He literally says he thinks 'creating a culture' is the same as 'I hung a sign on the door.' Well no. A lot of management thinking (5 Whys etc) has gone into breaking down problems into micro-blockers. If your graphic designer is constantl…

Perhaps you didn't make it to this part of the article: > 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. > The goal wasn’t inflexible dates and…

Then he should call it, "a culture of no surprises and collective problem solving." Calling it "no excuses" is part of the management problem he has identified.

My experience is, there are often other dimensions to the issue of commitment.

There is a conscientiousness that comes from being an owner of a company. It's rare to have an employee who maintains the same level of attention as an "owner." That's just how things are. Demanding that employees increase their attention to their work won't change this, or at least not for long. As the article suggests, you can work on developing a culture where people are more likely to be forthcoming and cooperative, but that only goes so far.

There are some employees who do attend to their work the way an owner would, often to their own detriment. Overwork is a real problem for their own wellbeing, and their overall ability to grow and change. It can be a problem for the employer as well, for lots of reasons, including an over-reliance on a few key people.

You can make sure that everyone has enough of a stake to consider themselves an owner, as in a co-op, but co-ops don't seem to scale. That's fine for plenty of businesses, but not for the kinds of businesses that venture capital wants to invest in.

EDIT: The clip art illustrating the article, Pinocchio, suggests a moral element in the author's world view, it conflates lying with missing deadlines and making excuses and not keeping people informed. If people are lying to you as a manager, you should ask yourself why.

Re: The no excuses culture

#47

Post by derefr »

Mz wrote: post #23
derefr wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No, I think the OP is correct. My father and ex husband were career military and I was a full time mom. Both the military and parenting have this in common: You may not be in control of certain things, nonetheless, you are responsible for the outcome. In other words, kids are autonomous beings and may do things the parent does not want them to do. When the law says money is owed due to the child breaking something, t…

> When the law says money is owed due to the child breaking something, they come after the parents. In the military, if you are in charge, you take the fall when things go wrong, even if it wasn't your fault.

Ah, but these are both situations where, to my phrasing, there could have been "enough planning [to] circumlocute the problem." In other words, the punishment falls on the parents or the officer who trained those who failed, to complete the feedback loop back to their training style. If they had trained their children/soldiers better, the event in question perhaps could have been prevented. And it might be prevented in the future, due to that negative feedback.

A CIO of a large corporation usually would be fired if the company's business halts for 48 hours (losing money) because a datacenter got hit by a meteor. This is not because the CIO could have seen a meteor-strike coming, but rather because they could have put processes in place for fault-tolerance/high-availability, such that any random act-of-god that takes out the data-center wouldn't have mattered to the business.

It's not the CIO's fault if a datacenter blows up, but it is the CIO's fault if "a datacenter blowing up" is able to halt their business, when there is something they could have thought of that and put in place, long ago, that would have interrupted that causal chain in the present.

But a parent, or a military officer, or a corporate executive, usually isn't blamed for what amounts to "enemy action"—where something intentionally malicious out-thinks every preparation you've made and goes ahead and ruins your day anyway. Parents, for example, aren't blamed for what their children do when they've been told to do that thing by another authority figure. Executives aren't blamed for rival companies' industrial sabotage. Generals aren't blamed if a sudden trap is sprung during a retreat, turning it into a rout.

Re: The no excuses culture

#49

Post by chadaustin »

Funny, I was just thinking about this and Steve Blank.

Early at IMVU we really struggled with our crash rate. It was a 3D desktop application for _mainstream computers_. This was back before Windows 7 and everyone had terrible onboard graphics chips with equivalently terrible drivers.

During a board of advisors meeting, our CEO presented our crash metrics and justified it by saying "We might not be able to improve these metrics much - we're one of the only applications shipping 3D graphics on almost every computer."

Steve Blank immediately ripped into him: "That's an engineer's justification! Figure it out!"

I felt pretty guilty because I was the one who'd planted that idea in our CEO's head just days before.

Of course there _were_ ways to improve application reliability in the presence of driver crashes. You just have to move the rendering code into another process like Chrome does, detect when it crashes, and restart. :)

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