Manager has piss poor communication then "solves" it by threatening to fire people. Genius.
The no excuses culture
101–110 of 171 posts
Re: The no excuses culture
#102This 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…
> If your graphic designer is constantly sick, then that is a problem, and it doesn't mean that your VP deserves to be fired for failing to open up Photoshop himself. It's not the VP's job to do as it as the VP is not a graphic designer. The VP isn't a hero for having a go- what the VP produces is likely to be shit.
Some would say that's the difference between a graphic designer and a VP. Steve Jobs had a similar view:
> 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.
Re: The no excuses culture
#103Sounds 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 sh…
You miss the point that "no excuses" is exactly that system.
A manager shouldn't have to ping every subordinate every day for status updates, that's annoying to both and should be unnecessary. Management only works through delegation, you need to trust your subordinates to do delegated tasks without hand-holding, but you also need to give them a protocol for exceptions, which is exactly what this is.
Managers usually have other work besides managing people, from their own projects to strategic planning and budgeting. If you are required to also micromanage the projects of your subordinates, you have the wrong subordinates.
Re: The no excuses culture
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
In agile, individual developer does not have personal responsibility for anything. Where in the world do you get this idea? For one, there is no such thing as "agile", in the sense of a prescriptive methodology that would make such a declaration. There are just individual methodologies that claim varying levels of adherence to the Agile Manifesto[1]. And even then, the popular "Agile" methodologies like Scrum, XP, et…
Are you sure? Daily standups = checking up on you every 8 hours, and then you have tons of checkups in-between. Retros, sprint planning, ticket management. Agile methodology is designed for a tech lead to know what each member of the team is doing. Agile methodology is not "here's a large task, I don't want to hear from you again until it's completed".
None of that stuff is "Agile". Those things are artifacts / ceremony related with specific methodologies which are only "agile" to varying degrees. Read the Agile Manifesto, there's almost nothing prescriptive in there at all.
Agile methodology is designed for a tech lead to know what each member of the team is doing.
That might be the case for some specific "agile" methodology, but if there's a core essence to Agile, it's about embracing and responding to change... nothing to do with tech leads.
Re: The no excuses culture
#105Whatever kind of person Steve Blank is as a person is being discussed to death in the comments. I think that what this shows is that most people on HN have a lot of scar tissue from bad management. Bad management will say "tell me your problems before they become excuses" but then ignore you, then, berate you when the deadline comes due. "Why isn't the project done?" "Well like I told you last week..." "Don't give me excuses!" We've all been there.
What Steve Blank writes here is the outer dialog and what seems to be missing is the inner dialog - listen to what your reports say! When an engineer says to you, at the end of the day, "this component just doesn't make any sense and I don't know what to do to make it work" don't just slap them on the back on the way out the door and say "I'm sure you'll figure it out, just try a little harder," maybe you as a manager should engage a little more then in the moment.
Re: The no excuses culture
#106Sounds 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 sh…
It sounds to me like he walked into a situation where accountability did not exist and then he fixed the problem. He inherited the problems. He didn't create them.
The piece is full of good advice on how to set up a culture where things actually get done.
Re: The no excuses culture
#107Sounds 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 sh…
Thank god someone got it. Toyota Production system talks about exactly the same thing. It's the manager's job to make sure everything is running on time.
Toyota makes cars, most of the employees are doing specificsly defined tasks, they aren't usually knowledge workers. It's the managers responsibility that schedules are met, but empowering subordinates to work independently and only interrupt for problems they can't solve is far more efficient than micromanaging each one.
Re: The no excuses culture
#108This 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 think this ignores the problem that in many cases you don't have a good estimate for a date. If the task is one I know well I can estimate well. But if the question is when some new functionality will be deployed, it's just a best guess.
And for many tasks you simply don't know if it is going to work until the day of. Especially when you are trying to schedule aggressively.
Re: The no excuses culture
#109Sounds 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 sh…
He does have a system. Communication between managers and doers. That's all he's asking for.
Re: The no excuses culture
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely, I agree. I wrote about left wing, because OP specifically mentioned left wing somehow being incompatible with authoritarianism. I think that only wing incompatible with authoritarianism is pro-democracy crowd.
And libertarian-ism!
Libertarianism or libertarianism?
The Libertarian Party has had no problems with nominating authoritarians: Bob Barr comes to mind. Gary Johnson willingly sent people to prison for drugs as governor. The LP is more of a flag of convenience for protest votes.