Curiouser and Curiouser! on work

Bring on the joy

Tue, 05 Jul 2005 11:07:23 +0100

Remove barriers that rob people of joy in their work. This will mean abolishing the annual rating or merit system that ranks people and creates competition and conflict.[Deming quoted at MiniMicrosoft]

There is quite a lot more about the trouble managers face at Microsoft (and presumably many other organisations too) with having compensation competition and the fall-out this brings.

The twittering of the no-birds

Sun, 09 Oct 2005 09:31:42 +0100

I was reading an article by Mini about management at Microsoft and a quote by Ken Moss, general manager of search at Microsoft, caught my attention:

No Birds
2 1/2 years ago, I was asked to be the technical leader for a new team that would build from scratch a world-class search engine. Google already had a huge lead in quality and market share and many people within Microsoft said "no way" or "Ken, youre taking a no-win job" or "MSN doesnt have the technical skills" or even "youre going to have to use Linux" I call these people the "no-birds".
Now, its important to distinguish the no-birds from people who are constructively criticizing. No-birds are usually very creative and intelligent people, but their efforts are misguided. All they care about is shooting down ideas. They take pride in talking loudly, getting listened to, and are content measuring their impact based on any change in a plan even if its just making things so confusing that nothing gets done. They secretly are happy when things are screwed up. They are worthless.

This worries me. I talk loudly, I like being listened to, and I like having impact. I often feel that I can be overly negative and critical. It makes me wonder, am I (sometimes) a no-bird?

In my defence I try to admit when I'm wrong about things (which will allow other people to weigh whether they listen to me) and I always try to suggest how I would improve whatever it is we are talking about. Then I try to do it.

Hmmmm. How can you know when you have the balance between criticism and support right?

The rule is to destroy

Tue, 09 May 2006 15:11:58 +0100

I was reading a peace by Lew Rockwell about the negative effects of the state on economic progress when I came across something very interesting which I have often wondered about:

Even the shape of your office is influenced by intervention. Thirty years ago, offices started using cubicles to house workers. Cubicles are still the largest selling office furniture, despite a huge range of management experts who say that they create a bad form of business environment.

Why do they persist? In 1968, the Treasury Department created new depreciation schedules that subsidized cubicles at the expense of separate offices. Companies can depreciate cubicle walls in 7 years, whereas permanent office structures are given a 39.5-year rate. In other words, the costs of cubicles are more quickly recoverable than offices. This one change alone is what turned our workplaces into pictures out of Brave New World instead of the comfortable and humane places that they should be.

Tools

Thu, 06 Jul 2006 21:57:09 +0100

Yesterday I upgraded to the newly released VoodooPad 3.0 personal wiki. I bought VP about 2 weeks ago to use as my primary note-taking application and I'm really impressed with it. The improvements in 3.0 (such as tabbed pages, swapping the drawer for OmniGraffle style inspectors, and the print to PDF inside a VoodooPad page) are just icing on the cake.

I now mainly use a trio of tools when working on a project. I use VoodooPad as my note taking tool to track ideas, links (I never really got on with del.icio.us or ma.gnolia), and so on.

Then I use MindJet MindManager for brainstorming and thinking things out. As an aside I think MindJet are to be commended on having done a fabulous job with MindManager for Mac. It's a beautful Cocoa application not some crappy conversion of a Windows app.

Lastly I use OmniOutliner Professional to flesh things out, drill into the detail, and organize. From there I tend to either go straight to implementation, or create a Word document or a PDF.

In the last few days the division of labour between MM and OO has shifted though. MindManager has a great, free, viewer for Mac & Windows. This means I can share maps with the rest of the company. I haven't found anything like a good solution for sharing outlines with my windows using colleagues and it's a real problem.

This means I am tending to use maps more than outlines, even when the outliner really is the better tool for the job. I wish the folks at OmniGroup would do a decent outliner viewer for Windows and solve my problems.

Other tools I have kicking around in the information tools category are Microsoft Office (although I only tend to use Word), KeyNote, OmniGraffle Pro for when I need to diagram, EasyCrop for screen captures and general image futzing, CMapTools when I want to draw concept diagrams, and of course the veritable TextMate for general text wrangling.