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141 " But they haven’t really solved the spam problem because most of the spam in your In-box comes from co-workers. Of course, you’re not used to thinking of such messages as spam, but most of them are. Any message that is sent to one person with copies to half a dozen or more other recipients is candidate spam. The person it was directed to probably needed to see it, but how about the others? Were you on the receiving end because some action was required of you, or were you just included FYI? An "
― Tom DeMarco , Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams
142 " Yes, technology is moving swiftly, but (the High-Tech Illusion again) most of what you’re doing is not truly high-tech work. While the machines have changed enormously, the business of software development has been rather static. We still spend most of our time working on requirements and specification, the low-tech part of our work. Productivity within the software industry has improved by 3 to 5 percent a year, only marginally better than the steel or automobile industry. "
143 " Each of these standards says, in effect, “I will dictate to you exactly how you must do every aspect of the work … except the hard part. "
― Tom DeMarco , Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency
144 " The right way to think about domain knowledge is as a corporate capital asset, as dollars of investment in the head of each knowledge worker, put there by organizational investment in that employee. When that person leaves, the asset is gone. If you did a rigorous accounting of this human capital, you would be obliged to declare an extraordinary loss each time one of your people quit. "
145 " Reinvention takes place in the middle of the organization, so the first requisite is that there has to be a middle. I'll assume your organization still has one. Now pour in some slack, increase safety, and take steps to break down managerial isolation. Viola, the formula for middle-of-the-hierarchy reinvention. "
146 " Process standardization from on high is disempowerment. It is a direct result of fearful management, allergic to failure. "
147 " Since they can’t alter the rate of mental discriminations (basic elements of knowledge work) per second, their potential to respond to pressure is severely limited. All they can do is Eliminate wasted time Defer tasks that are not on the critical path Stay late "
148 " As defense against failure, standard process is a kind of armor. The more worried you are about failure, the heavier the armor you put on. But armor always has a side effect of reduced mobility. "
149 " MANAGEMENT BY OBJECTIVES is a fad from the 1950s, now largely discredited. But it hasn’t gone away. Badly run companies everywhere are still plagued by this simplistic, easy-as-pie management technique that most often achieves ends that are the exact opposite of those intended and desired. Like most hard-to-shake diseases, this one seems to thrive on the same mix of factors that damages its host. And it is self-perpetuating: MBO companies respond to each failed quarter by instituting still more MBO. Bottom-line failures are excused as due to uncontrollable market factors, while successive improvements in selected quantitatively expressed objectives are loudly touted as proof that management really is succeeding in spite of the dismal results. MBO Primer Here’s how it works: Performance of each department or division of the company is characterized by one or a few quantitative measures, called objectives. Managers are now encouraged to manage to the objectives, to cause each indicator to move in the desired direction toward its selected target. A manager is declared to have succeeded completely if the objective meets or exceeds the target. "
150 " In a healthy knowledge-worker organization, people don’t waste a lot of time anyway, since wasted time is an affront to them as much as it is to their management. "
151 " Continuing stasis is a consequence of the first flawed assumption at the heart of MBO: the ingenuous belief that success of the overall organization can be viewed as a simple arithmetic combination of lower-level objectives. The assumption is almost impossible to implement unless nearly everything is in steady state. "
152 " A company in this kind of flux can be viewed as a portfolio of projects. Each project seeks to effect some change. In an older, simpler time, projects were a way to move from one status quo to another. The project was a disruption, but the new status quo, once established, could be expected to last for an extended period. Now there is no new status quo. "
153 " work performance is not an abstraction: You can’t say that Ted is a high-performance worker in general, only that he has proved himself good at doing some one particular thing. Fragmentation "
154 " In a healthy knowledge-worker organization, people don’t waste a lot of time anyway, since wasted time is an affront to them as much as it is to their management. They are more likely to be frustrated by wasted time than enjoy it. "
155 " Slackless organizations tend to be authoritarian. When efficiency is the principal goal, decision making can't be distributed. It has to be in the hands of one person (or a few), with everyone else taking direction without question and acting quickly to carry out orders. This is a fine formula for getting a lot done, but a dismal way to encourage reinvention and learning. "
156 " people aren’t inclined to work on tasks in the wrong order, since they derive satisfaction from accomplishment, and a motivation toward meaningful accomplishment tends to steer them onto the critical path. A little pressure might decrease wasted time slightly and cause an equally slight improvement in focusing on the critical path. "
157 " The trade-off between price and quality does not exist in Japan. Rather, the idea that high quality brings on cost reduction is widely accepted.1 "
158 " Worker density (say, workers per thousand square feet) is inversely proportional to dedicated space per person. "
159 " The best managers use pressure only rarely and never over extended periods. "
160 " Believers insist that dysfunction is not an intrinsic flaw of MBO, but a simple matter of poor implementation. When dysfunction occurs, they (our era’s new commissars) refine and redefine the objectives and try again. After five decades of experience with MBO, its believers are still refining and redefining and still waiting for results. I’m ready to call MBO’s constant failure intrinsic. "