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The no excuses culture

steveblank.com

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Re: The no excuses culture

#61

Post by rhizome »

pm90 wrote: post #36
kristianc wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah the 'I'll fire your ass if you give me an excuse on the due date but of course an attempt to maintain an open line of communication between now and then will be met with sunshine and rainbows.' Let's call this disingenuous bullshit what it is - management by fear. Don't tell me you're about 'collective problem solving' in an environment where people are constantly fearing for their jobs.

Heh, I think it made sense upto the point where he threatened firing people. I agree that is too extreme: you're gonna quickly lose a lot of people who perform best when they're not under constant pressure.

He comes from a culture where nobody is fired and failing upwards is almost a natural law.

Re: The no excuses culture

#62

Post by getpost »

eric_b wrote: post #51

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that most people on HN don't like this attitude. I used to think this kind of thing was stupid too. "Oh, management by fiat, that will never work". I see comments here talking about management by fear, or, ironically, making excuses as to why this won't work most places. I've worked in numerous Fortune 500's, and without a doubt the biggest piece missing from the dysfunctional teams i…

A big problem in our culture now is that there isn't accountability at the senior level and now everyone knows it. (But eric_b's comment seems perfectly reasonable, and I'm baffled it's being downvoted.)

Re: The no excuses culture

#63

Post by quotemstr »

chadaustin wrote: post #49

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 th…

You can do the same on Android: the stagefright client libraries are terribly buggy, and sometimes crash if you get the timing wrong or tickle the demuxers the wrong way. It's possible (but undocumented) to send Surface instances across Binder to a separate service process and render there. There are no obsolete ideas.

Re: The no excuses culture

#64

Post by watwut »

analog31 wrote: post #24

I've always been struck by an odd irony in academia: People tend to have left-wing political beliefs, but maintain an organizational culture that is decidedly authoritarian. Perhaps this is necessary: I can't think of how else to manage a classroom than to have hard deadlines for things like homework assignments. Even in college, by definition, the work is finished when the semester ends. I'm personally guilty of mis…

There is no contradiction between left-wing and authoritarianism. Communists as they were rising to power and in power were all about that.

Re: The no excuses culture

#65

Post by SerLava »

watwut wrote: post #12
_m8fo wrote: post #9

As 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 t…

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.

Yeah, he rallied around the "no excuses" mantra because it felt good. And sure enough, halfway down the page he says the department dramatically reduced the amount of work intake.

Gee.

It seems like most of the excuses could be boiled down to "Well, you told me to complete a project, but then later you told me not to complete it, so I didn't."

Re: The no excuses culture

#66

Post by rhizome »

cj wrote: post #54
getpost wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thi…

Agree with renaming the article ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13846741 ) - but I'm glad Blank posted this rather than not posting for fear of HN attacks for not wording things perfectly. > 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 t…

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.

Ahistorical and naive. If a VP in this organization thinks they might fall under the blade of "no excuses," he will sacrifice any number of his "isn't managing people" people.

Re: The no excuses culture

#67

Post by Animats »

That's the Curtis LeMay approach to management.[1] He was famously into management by fear.

We see this problem in software, especially in DevOps and "agile" shops, because the process is so forgiving of delay. In a manufacturing plant, no product comes out until all the component parts are ready. So there's a "no excuses" culture about running out of parts, or having an assembly line station down unexpectedly. Software rarely has that.

Organizations with real "no excuses" cultures have spares and reserves. They have a backup plan if a key person is sick or unavailable, or something important doesn't show up. They have slogans like "two is one and one is none". This is seldom seen in software development.

[1] http://www.au.af.mil/au/afri/aspj/digital/pdf/articles/2014-...

Re: The no excuses culture

#69

Post by scandox »

No surprises. Agreed. Consequences. Agreed. Firing people. Bad idea. If the biggest lesson you teach people is the one they learn as they leave your organization, then I think you're wasting a good crisis.

Re: The no excuses culture

#70

Post by travisjungroth »

randomdrake wrote: post #16

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…

I read that essay and enjoyed it very much. I think it was a message I needed to hear and I plan to read it again.

It also made me think of effective management. Imagine that while Rowan was in the jungle looking for Garcia one of his many bosses stopped by and told him to carry a message to Rivera.

Does he do as he's told without complaint? That means dropping his other task. Does he ask his boss which is more important (a question that is often met with "both are important"). Or more directly, which should he do first ("work on them in parallel").

And all this time, while priorities are being reassessed, Garcia is moving through the hills and no messages are being delivered at all.

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