Business Insight Zone

Cast your mind back to the July 1 release date of The Day-Glo Brothers, the debut effort from longtime Hooverite Chris Barton, when this blog celebrated the arrival of the book.

Well, Chris’s hard work has paid off in the form of having The Day-Glo Brothers listed as one of Publisher’s Weekly’s 30 Best Children’s Books of 2009! Check out the whole list here:

Best Children’s Books of 2009

Congratulations to Chris — we couldn’t be prouder!

(Oh, and look for his follow-up book, Shark vs. Train, in April 2010!)

This is what I get for waiting to do a job “the right way.” For months now I’ve been meaning to write a review of Talent Is Overrated by Geoff Colvin. It’s a good book, albeit with flaws, that has lots of important ideas about “deliberate practice.” But the review I have in mind would probably rival my Russian-novel-esque treatment of Edward Hallowell’s CrazyBusy, and who has the time for that?

So, for now here are pointers to three items on Talent is Overrated that I’ve found useful:

1. You don’t get better at writing essays by writing more essays. In this post, G. Brett Miller draws on his U.S. Army experience to confirm Colvin’s observation that the military, at least in peacetime, does a much better job than the mainstream of corporate America at performing deliberate practice. Key quote:

When I left the military and joined the corporate world, what struck me most was how little practicing — and how little learning and improving — anyone did. For anything.

It’s worth pondering Miller’s comparison of the typical corporation to the military in wartime.

2. Software coder Mark Needham offers a straightforward summary of the concepts of the book in his detailed book review. Although he uses some examples from the world of computer programming, nontechnical readers will also get a lot from his clear exposition of the book’s principles.

I particularly like Needham’s call “to create shorter and more effective feedback cycles for individuals to help them to get better.” This is a real challenge for companies that are married to annual reviews as the main (or only!) means of regular feedback, but it’s a challenge that must be overcome if the principles of deliberate practice are to take hold in an organization.

3. At his Three Star Leadership Blog, Wally Bock takes Colvin’s book down a peg in “Talent is Overrated is overrated and overpriced.” Bock praises Colvin for laying out important precepts — talent is overrated, and you will need a lot of time working on your skills — but suggests that readers might be as well served to read Colvin’s FORTUNE articles on the subject (to which he links), along with a related item from the Harvard Business Review.

Bock also says that, in the book,

There’s too little attention paid to other factors that influence success like coaching, family support, developmental assignments, and luck. There’s virtually no discussion of the fact that for leadership and other business skill areas, learning and doing intertwine.

I liked the book better than Wally did, but I do agree that Colvin didn’t do as much as he might’ve to explain specifically how his paragons of business deliberate practice, Jeff Immelt and Steve Ballmer, used deliberate practice to ascend the heights of corporate success.

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I’ll give a more detailed critique of the book soon. Meanwhile, what are your thoughts?

• If you’ve read Talent Is Overrated, what do you think of it?
• Even if you haven’t, what do you think of the premise that deliberate practice can improve business performance?

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Related:

• Deliberate practice in a nutshell.
• Deliberate practice in the working world.

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Don’t own one, but Amazon’s Kindle certainly seems like a nifty machine (especially when you do things like this with it). But the price tag on the new Kindle aimed at the education market has earned the product plenty of pans in the early going.

Given my earlier views on the subject of dedicated e-book readers versus multipurpose gadgets like the iPhone (see links at the bottom of this post), you won’t be surprised that this item from ZDNet’s Between the Lines blog caught my eye:

• Amazon Kindle’s $489 price tag makes iPod Touch a better buy

The concept of the Kindle is great, but it’s highly limited in certain ways (connectivity, format of books, etc.), it’s expensive, and it doesn’t do nearly as much — or have nearly the storage — of competing products like the iPhone and iTouch.

Will people read books on a handheld electronic device? That question has already been answered with a resounding Yes, and I can’t see that trend doing anything but grow in years to come. But I doubt the Kindle — at least as currently configured and priced — is the platform where very many e-books will be read.

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Related posts:

• iPhones and e-books: sometimes I DO predict the future.
• Is the iPhone the answer for e-books?

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Are your thoughts and obligations packed together this tightly?

The Attention Deficit Doctor

Dr. Edward Hallowell is psychiatrist who’s known best for his groundbreaking work on Attention Deficit Disorder. He coined the term “Attention Deficit Trait,” or ADT, to refer to the ADD-like symptoms that affect so many of us today because we overstimulate ourselves with too much information, too many obligations, too many inputs.

If you suffer from ADT — no shame in that — here’s a three-point summary of Hallowell’s book CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap! Strategies for Coping in a World Gone ADD:

• “Owing to disorganization, frustration, and the feeling of being overloaded, the person tends to waste his or her creativity, energy, and talent, getting more and more buried under unmet obligations, unfinished projects, and piles of books or papers waiting to be read.”
• The antidote is straightforward to describe, but difficult to implement: “In order to cope with the many demands of everyday life and the information overload each day brings, a person needs to be able to stop and think, to pause over one point long enough to extract what matters before moving on. . . . Life is a powerful accelerator these days; what separates the successful from the frustrated is the quality of their brakes and their ability to use them.”
• Working harder or faster will never be the solution to this problem, because of basic constraints in how our brains work; Hallowell takes considerable pains to describe these constraints and how to work with them instead of against them.

If any of this rings a bell for you, I encourage you to find a time to set aside your busyness long enough to read what follows. And if this review prompts you to read CrazyBusy, so much the better. I wouldn’t call it a timeless classic, but it is a highly informed analysis of our current maddening ways of doing business — personally and collectively — and it’s loaded with wise prescriptions, both scientific and philosophical, for how you can turn down the “crazy” in your life by turning down the level of “busy” that plagues so many of us.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Book Review

Let me tell you a little story at my own expense. Last year, after writing about Read more

From William Goldman’s novel, The Princess Bride (1973):

When I was twenty-six, my first novel, The Temple of Gold, was published by Alfred A. Knopf. (Which is now part of Random House which is now part of R.C.A. which is just part of what’s wrong with publishing in America today which is not part of this story.)

(Note that Knopf is still owned by Random House, but they’re both now part of Bertelsmann.)

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ADDENDUM, later on Thursday — Teresa Nielsen Hayden has a typically incisive* take on the latest bit of horrible news for the U.S. publishing business:

• Making Light: Blood in the gutters at Farrar, Straus

(* “Typically incisive,” in TNH’s case, is a synonym for “routinely brilliant.”)

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Related post:

• “Black Wednesday” strikes book publishing.

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Charlie Munger has been Warren Buffett’s partner in Berkshire Hathaway for decades, and is a justly influential business thinker in his own right. In this tidbit from Alice Schroeder’s biography of Buffett, The Snowball, Munger gives a name to a poisonous syndrome that I’ve witnessed many, many times in my own career, worst of all among top managers.

But while [Munger] considered himself an amateur scientist and architect and did not hesitate to expound on Einstein, Darwin, rational habits of thinking, and the ideal distance between houses in a Santa Barbara subdivision, Munger was nonetheless wary of venturing very far from what he had spent some time to learn. He dreaded falling prey to what a Harvard Law School classmate of his had called “the Shoe Button Complex.”

“His father commuted daily with the same group of men,” Munger said. “One of them had managed to corner the market in shoe buttons — a really small market, but he had it all. He pontificated on every subject, all subjects imaginable. Cornering the market on shoe buttons made him an expert on everything. Warren and I have always sensed it would be a big mistake to behave that way.”

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Related posts:

• Marc Andreessen and Charlie Munger walk into a bar . . .
• Irrationality in investment decisions.
• Confirmation bias: fight the Procrustean instinct.
• Company of the Day (09/05/2007): Berkshire Hathaway.

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The short version: This crisp little book is stuffed with practical advice and important philosophical insights for any manager, in the software business or otherwise, who wants to build better teams. It also implies good advice for non-managers who want to be a building block, rather than an obstacle, toward better teams. Plus the book has a sense of humor!

Read on for the full-dress version . . .

Joel Spolsky long ago proved his chops as a master programmer: among other things, he was on the early team at Microsoft that developed a spreadsheet application called Excel. (Perhaps you’ve heard of it?) But since 2000 he’s won a far broader base of fans with his site Joel on Software, where he writes with wit and insight on all aspects of the software business, from the technical to the managerial to the architectural. (That’s architecture as in buildings, not as in software design.)

Better, he proves that being a crack programmer and expressing oneself well in English can go hand in hand; his essays, besides being models of informal good humor, are written in the clearest prose. It really does make sense to talk about his pieces as “essays” rather than “posts,” since many of them rise far above the standard of the garden-variety blog entry.

LESSONS BEYOND SOFTWARE

This must account for his appeal beyond the software development community. I myself could not — not with a gun to my head — program anything on a computer; the Pascal and Basic I learned once upon a time in school have long ago departed from my mind, and the HTML tweaks I make to Web pages hardly count as programming. Yet I return to Spolsky again and again for his good sense on many aspects of business, and for his insights into human nature, a topic far more important to business than any technical consideration.

Having said all this, you will understand why this book, although it contains a handful of computer-science references that are over my head, is well worth reading for anyone who wants to do a better job of attracting top talent. More and more, I evaluate business books on how well they offer (metaphorical, not software) “algorithms“ that transcend industries and circumstances, and how much they tell their readers about using those algorithms to get business done. Judged on that score, Smart & Get Things Done lives up to its own name, admirably.

SPOLSKY’S FORMULA FOR PROFIT

Since 2000, Spolsky has run Fog Creek Software, the small New York City firm that he co-founded. His formula for Fog Creek was simple — but difficult — from the beginning:

• Best Working Conditions –>
• Best Programmers –>
• Best Software –>
• Profit!

So far, the formula has worked to a T. Fog Creek continues to thrive “even though” (Spolsky would say “because”) it supplies every programmer with a private office in Manhattan. As of last year, when Spolsky wrote this book, none of his programmers had ever quit. I’d say that’s a pretty good recommendation, both for Fog Creek and for Spolsky’s fitness to write this book.

In the book, Spolsky discusses the many obstacles you will face as you try to recruit top talent, and offers advice and encouragement for overcoming each of them.

HITTING THE HIGH NOTES

Early on, he gives his rationale for hiring the best of the best in the first place. He compares way-above-average programmers to those rare operatic sopranos who can hit that staggering F6 in Mozart’s “Queen of the Night” aria. No number of mediocre sopranos combined will ever hit that note, just as no number of mediocre designers combined could ever achieve the design appeal of the iPod.

As icing on the cake, superstars are also more productive than mediocre performers, so they can hit deadlines and debug code efficiently while sparing brainpower for deeper issues like style, user happiness, and emotional appeal — the very things that have made the iPod such a runaway hit.

THE IMPORTANCE OF WORKSPACES

So that his great programmers can give attention to these issues, Spolsky has gone to great lengths to give them optimal workspaces with doors that shut, multiple big monitors, superfast computers, comfortable chairs, and big worktops. I’ve learned a lot from Spolsky’s site about the need for creative people to operate in the Flow state for long periods, and about the concomitant evil of interruptions. In the book, he spells out his rationale for this in some detail, pointing out the horrible false economies in skimping on things like large LCD monitors, Aeron chairs, and separate offices with doors that shut.

Some of these measures will be beyond the reach of middle managers in the corporate world, but even if you can’t wrangle private offices for your people, you can follow Spolsky’s lead in demonstrating extraordinary care to the social and physical settings in which your people work. For starters, you can set better expectations about how the team’s workflow will go, especially in the area of not interrupting one another.

RECRUITING THE BEST

Much of the book details Spolsky’s process for recruiting and screening potential hires for Fog Creek. He offers convincing reasons why resume mills and other standard recruitment practices — including employee referrals — are ineffective for finding the superstars you need to hit the highest notes in software design.

Among other things, he talks about the absurdity of having professional recruiters who aren’t savvy in programming screen out resumes based on simplistic combinations of technical keywords. The best hackers can get up and running in new programming languages in a couple of weeks, so the fact that their resumes don’t already contain all the specific languages you’re looking for ought not be used to disqualify a brilliant programmer from consideration.

Spolsky’s own process of recruitment depends on pursuing star programmers early, while they still have a couple of years left in college. He has gone to great trouble to build an appealing, even dazzling, internship program at Fog Creek, because he knows that many of the very best programmers essentially never go on the job market: their professors help them get top internships, the companies where they intern extend pre-emptive hiring offers to them, and for the rest of their career they’ll be hired away by other firms based on their established reputation for awesomeness.

But whether you can follow this internship model or not, Spolsky offers lots of practical advice on the screens you need to put in place when you’re reviewing resumes, screening solid candidates by phone, and interviewing the best candidates in person. He even suggests particular questions you might ask, some technical and some general, at each step along the way.

SCREEN AND SCREEN AGAIN

The point of all this screening — and he recommends a lot of it — is to find the candidates who match the title of his book:

Remember, Smart and Gets Things Done. The only way you’re going to be able to tell if somebody Gets Things Done is to see if historically they have tended to get things done in the past.

He makes a special point of looking for those who display passion for their work (”You want people to care about the stuff that they did”) and who have a track record of working past roadblocks (”I’m looking for people who challenged the status quo, who overcame objections, and who made things happen”).

As as aside, I would point out that this good advice doesn’t apply only to hiring managers. In these uncertain economic times, it’s a good idea for workers who are concerned about their job security — i.e., potentially anybody — to think about how well these traits show up in their own work histories. Maybe you can’t change your level of “smart” overnight (though I think even that can be improved over time), but you surely can do more to demonstrate “passionate,” “gets things done,” and “overcomes obstacles.” In fact, now would be an excellent time to get that ball rolling.

HIRE OR NO HIRE

Why is it so important to enforce so many screening processes, with such an unforgiving focus on “Smart” and “Gets Things Done”? According to Spolsky, “It’s because it is much, much better to reject a good candidate than to accept a bad candidate.”

Lots of companies pay lip service to hiring, maintaining, promoting, and developing the most talented workers, but Spolsky’s business formula for Fog Creek absolutely depends on it. As he puts it, “Great people are much, much more valuable than average people. In programming, they are three to ten times as productive, while only costing 20% or 30% more. And they hit high notes that nobody else can hit.” That’s how you create the kind of great products that supply you with enough profits that you can afford to have private offices for everybody in your Manhattan offices. It’s a virtuous cycle, but every aspect of it fundamentally requires that Spolsky hire only the very best programmers.

As Spolsky explains, worthy candidates whom you mistakenly reject will land on their feet anyway — they’ll just end up programming for Oracle or Google rather than you. But taking on even one unworthy candidate spoils the mix: that weak link in the chain will create problems, not just in their own work but at all the points where their work interacts with everyone else’s.

All of this implies a very simple evaluation rubric for Spolsky: Hire or No Hire. If you’re not sure about a candidate . . . No Hire. If you think they might work out . . . No Hire. If you think they could work out, but only if they’re slotted on the perfect team . . . No Hire. At every phase of the screening process, every person who’s doing the screening votes “Hire” or “No Hire.” There is no maybe.

This rubric generalizes very well to other contexts, I think. Plenty of businesses would be well served to review more of their activities on a binary basis: “Great client” or “A Client We Don’t Want,” “High-Profit Activity” or “Activity We Don’t Do,” et cetera. Yes, it’s hard to apply, and no, you won’t be able to make the transition in two minutes — but it’s worth it to start moving in this direction.

OTHER JUICY TIDBITS

Along the way, Spolsky touches on some topics dear to my heart. Here are just a few:

–The fruitlessness of a command-and-control managerial model for knowledge workers. To make this point, Spolsky hearkens back to his experience as a young paratrooper in the Israeli military, and — in agreement with points I’ve made before — shows how inappropriate this model is for managing software programmers or other workers trying to do innovative work:

In other words, the military uses Command and Control because it’s the only way to get 18-year-olds to charge through a minefield, not because they think it’s the best management method for every situation.

In particular, in software development teams where good developers can work anywhere they want, playing soldier in going to get pretty tedious, and you’re not really going to keep anyone on your team.

Sure, if you’re the manager, you can always “win” the argument that begins with “You disobeyed a direct order!” by firing the disobedient worker — but you’ll lose in the long run.

–The need to make remarkable products.

The software marketplace, these days, is something of a winner-take-all system. Nobody else is making money on MP3 players other than Apple. Nobody else makes money on spreadsheets and word processors other than Microsoft . . .

You can’t afford to be number two, or to have a “good enough” product. It has to be remarkably good, by which I mean so good that people remark about it.

Seth Godin would be proud.

–The poverty of the “Econ 101″ management method. Trying to motivate your stars with nothing more than crass money incentives promotes extrinsic motivation (doing a thing for more money) and demotes intrinsic motivation (the desire to do a thing well for its own sake). In a riff that resonates with Mark McGuinness’s writing on the same subject, Spolsky says, “Intrinsic motivation is much stronger than extrinsic motivation. People work much harder at things that they actually want to do.”

Spolsky’s well-justified conviction on this point leads him to excoriate the Econ 101 model:

The biggest problem with Econ 101 management is that it’s not management at all: it’s an abdication of management. A deliberate refusal to figure out how things can be made better. It’s a sign that management simply doesn’t know how to teach people to do better work, so they force everybody in the system to come up with their own way of doing it.

Amen.

SUMMARY

Fortunately, Spolsky shows his readers much better ways of proceeding, not just in the abstract but in the nitty-gritty details of hiring great performers and cultivating great teams. If you want to hire better . . . if you want to attract better candidates for your team . . . if you want to manage high performers better . . . or if you want to think through your own development as a worker who’s Smart and Gets Things Done — this short book will repay your attention many times over.

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Related posts:

• The Basic Basics: “It’s my fault.”
• What if your company outlawed multitasking?

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Here’s Jeffrey Krames summarizing Peter Drucker:

Solving problems can only return the organization to its prior status quo. To achieve results managers must exploit opportunities.

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This quote is taken from “The IDB [Inside Drucker's Brain] Project” that John Moore is running on his excellent Brand Autopsy blog. Highly recommended — and look for more thoughts from me on the application of Drucker’s ideas to current business problems opportunities as I work my way through The Effective Executive and his landmark textbook, Management.

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Related posts:

• Algorithms, not tips.
• “What business are you in?”
• Embarrassing questions you should be asking in your organization.

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From CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap!, by Edward Hallowell:

But time, a far more precious asset than money, rolls on unnoticed. We spend it. We waste it. We even kill it. Killing time. It’s worse than burning money. Sages through the ages have cautioned us to seize the day, to make the most of the moment, to live each day as if it were our last, but rare is the person who truly does that. Time is a finite resource, but we behave as if it were infinite because, at the deepest level, we deny the fact of death in our everyday lives.

What Hallowell says reminds me of Benjamin Franklin in The Way to Wealth:

But dost thou love life, then do not squander time, for that’s the stuff life is made of.

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Related posts:

• How long, literally?
• The Magic Hour
• Time is the resource, but attention is the problem.

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From Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi:

Learning to manage one’s goals is an important step in achieving excellence in everyday life. To do so, however, does not involve either the extreme of spontaneity on the one hand, or compulsive control on the other. The best solution might be to understand the roots of one’s motivation, and while recognizing the biases involved in one’s desires, in all humbleness to choose goals that will provide order in one’s consciousness without causing too much disorder in the social or material environment. To try for less than this in to forfeit the chance of developing your potential, and to try for much more is to set yourself up for defeat.

(This matches what Geoff Colvin says in Talent is Overrated about how the best performers practice: with enough challenge to keep themselves from getting stale, but not with so much challenge that they panic or shut down.)

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Related posts:

• How Flow is like a good cup of coffee.
• Time is the resource, but attention is the problem.
• The joy of creation.
• This is how you get better: deliberate practice.

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