The no excuses culture

  No excuses for failures given, just facts and requests for help
  No excuses for failures accepted, just facts, and offers to help
  Relentless execution
  Individual honesty and integrity

We can just proclaim "PROBLEMS BE GONE!" and so it shall be! It's also so clear to me now!

What a load of crap. I've been on at least six developer teams, and the one thing that's proven true every time is that third party externalities will always find a way to hobble progress, introduces stalls in productivity, and wear down morale.

But there are deeper issues, particularly with software development, and undisprovable beliefs about which implementation of technology is THE ONE TRUE WAY.

People will always use that as a wedge, to alleviate the amount of work on their plate, and declare efficiency as the driving principle. But then! Non-technical people, clueless as ever about the machines that govern their livelihood (as glorified CRM receptionists) fail to understand, the truth is that it's just technical people pushing work around, spreading it in different arrangements, according to their liking.

  Let's bind everything to UNIX users 
  and LDAP permissions, that way the 
  system administrators can control 
  progress, and must be aware of all 
  tangential events.

  Gee, I can't create a folder structure
  on this file system, because I have to 
  wait for a sys admin to provide permissions
  just so I can create an index.html file
  at the location I need.

  How about we throw everything in a MySQL 
  database, and persist our data over there?

  Awesome, but wow, our table schema is 
  getting kind of huge. Managing it is 
  a chore unto itself.

  Let the DBA team control every aspect 
  of the RDBMS, so that every change to 
  the database schema requires their 
  involvement. This way, we'll always 
  have to ask them for permission to 
  introduce a new table or column.

  Okay, how about we just design our
  tables, to be gigantic structured 
  text blobs, of unlimited size, so
  that we don't have to wait for a DBA
  to respond to our schema change 
  requests? Sounds great! It's less work!

  NoSQL vs. SQL. Which is the one TRUE way?

  Man, this CGI programming is really 
  hard, and our PERL codebase is tough to read.
  Let's try PHP since it's so much easier to code.

  Wow, our PHP code is so disorganized.
  We should organize it into classes.

  That didn't help. PHP permits too 
  many ambiguities, and it's counter-productive.

  Javascript everywhere, at all times? 
  Why not a full re-write of the entire 
  system, because all we know how to use 
  is one client-side technology?

  Object Oriented Programming or Functional 
  Programming. Which is the one TRUE way?

  I'm having trouble sorting out which 
  functions are in scope, because there 
  are so many modules in this file tree,
  and I can't easily discern which file 
  references which, and in which order.
  So many functions are similarly named, 
  and many developers are simply overriding
  namespaces to control scope. We should 
  restrict who can create new files in
  this tree, so the library stays sane.

  Let's bind everything to UNIX users 
  and LDAP permissions, that way the 
  system administrators can control 
  progress, and must be aware of all 
  tangential events.

> There is a conscientiousness that comes from being an owner of a company.

The examples Blank uses in his article is VP-level (highly paid, large equity grants, etc). I think a lot of people are interpreting his advice in the context of someone who isn't managing people.

> It's rare to have an employee who maintains the same level of attention as an "owner."

Agree. But if you are a manager, you are the "owner" (and responsible) for the work of your direct reports.

"I will fire you if deadline is suddenly not met and no one else is there find out before if you don't say so" is on the opposite extreme from agile "everything is collective task, we check up on you every four hours and you are neither autonomous nor responsible".

Petulant, undetermined people do exist in subordinate roles. However, oftentimes managers put up barriers but then weep and moan into their hands - why oh why can't my job be to sit and ask for things to be completed?

High ranking officers can be relieved of command for doing the right thing, but breaking the rules to do it, a la this based-on-a-true-story movie: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behind_Enemy_Lines_(2001_fil...

I pulled my kids at homeschooled when it turned out the public schools were a mess where we moved for one duty station. I am "The buck stops here" kind of parent. Other adults being assholes and fucking up my kid is not an acceptable justification for letting my kids get fucked up.

My kids are intensely loyal to me. They know I can be trusted to do what is in their best interest, no excuses.