Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

A few weeks ago the Matewan High School football team intentionally ran up the score in a game over Burch High School, winning 64 to 0, so that their running back could set a record of 658 yards in a game. The Matewan coach, Yogi Kinder even had his team use a no-huddle offense through the second half so they would have more time to gain yards. As if that weren’t enough, Kinder choose not to return punts, letting them bounce back, so his tailback could get even more yards.

The coach’s actions and later attempts to justify his behavior are just despicable and represent some of the worst attributes in human nature.

Sadly this lack of sportsmanship isn’t limited to a few occurrences. I see it all the time playing hockey and friends that are competitively involved in other sports report the same thing.

I’ve seen and been in many games where one team is up a ridiculous amount (6 or more to 0) and the leading team is still going 100% trying to score more goals. I can count more than one case of a team leading by multiple goals with 15 seconds left and the winning team is still skating full speed end-to-end trying to get another goal.

Not only is it stupid, but it’s likely to lead to a situation where someone gets hurt. The losing team will often try to even the score with some more physical or “extra-curricular” play. Most times, the referee is equally disgusted with the offending team and “doesn’t see” anything, so the physical play can escalate.

My teams have strict rules against running up the score. Also, in the case that we have players that are too skilled for the division we don’t skate them. I want to win as much as anyone else, but to me a win is only meaningful if it’s a fair game.

Unfortunately though, neither of my teams have been winning that much, but that’s a topic for another post. :-)

I (finally) put a bunch of our wedding pictures online for people to look at. Instead of sharing all 1000+ pictures I picked “some” that I thought people would like the most. Also, these are the real pictures, no watermarks or anything.

- Hindu Ceremony
- Catholic Ceremony
- Saturday Reception

The rest of the stuff I’ve been promising (storybook, speeches, programs, etc.) are on hold as I struggle to design a nice website for them. I’ve gone through around 5 designs and hopefully I’ll eventually find something I like that looks good at all resolutions. If you have some experience in the area and have some time, I can tell you the various limitations I’ve been having with all the different tools and technology out there.

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team is another one of Patrick Lencioni’s leadership fables. I probably should have read this one first, because I found it to be the best of the ones I read so far.

In this book, he presents five major problems of dysfunctional teams and how to overcome them. The fable this time was a little more interesting and I gleaned a few interesting tidbits that cemented some business strategy thinking I’d been tossing around in my head for some time now (which I’ll talk about in a different post).

Lencioni presents the five in a manner similar to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: a pyramid where everything is built off the parts under it. It’s a nice framework to explain it, but he presents the elements out of order and it’s never really clear where the intrinsic dependency is.

The first dysfunction: absence of trust. This causes lack of open feedback and even debate on a team. The key here is to have environment where the team is comfortable to be vulnerable with each other. I like to think of this in terms of close families and friends. Close families are very open with each other. Good friendships are the ones where you don’t have to be guarded or worry about being “judged” on anything you say or do. Groups of friends that don’t have this openness are significantly less enjoyable and less fulfilling than those that do.

Lencioni suggests a number of exercises to help develop trust: personal history exchange, team effectiveness exercise, personality assessment (Myers-Briggs), and 360-degree feedback. All of these are useful, but I think most important is to hire the right people. If the individual doesn’t have warmth of character or a personable attitude, chances are no amount of team building exercises will fix the problem.

Next is “fear of conflict”. With this fear, the discussion and debates that are essential for the business will not occur. The main trick here is to distinguish the types of conflict, by encourage constructive debate and stopping destructive fighting and politics.

Lencioni suggests a few suggestions. First is to have a designated “miner of conflict” that uncovers buried disagreements and lets them be discussed openly and respectfully.

In the past I’ve had teams that did everything from disagree with nearly everything I wanted to do (mostly for political reasons) to teams that quietly did everything I said. The best teams with the best results were those that were in the middle. I feel that the key for those teams was when I established that my design’s or strategy’s success wasn’t tied to my self-worth or ego. As a result, people were comfortable making constructive criticism and the whole project benefited.

It sounds simple and obvious, but I’ve worked with so many people that tied their ego to their work, and felt that any criticism of their work was criticism of them as individuals.

The 3rd dysfunction is lack of commitment. For a team, this means you need clarity and buy-in. Teams will need to have consensus of everyone (even if you disagree) and certainty from the team that the decision making process was valid (especially if you disagree).

Good tools for this are having deadlines for when decisions are made, and making sure the decision making process had sufficient contingency planning to reduce people’s fears.

I think the main thing here is the need to have a consensus and agreement that the decision is made. It’s very bad to have the team continuously revisiting the same decision over and over again or just never making a decision (the “let’s plan for both, so we have flexibility” approach). Also, I’ve seen people running around undermining the decision or even sabotaging the work in the hope of proving that their idea was better.

The next dysfunction, which is a big problem in large corporations nowadays, is “lack of accountability”. This is especially hard when individual’s goals are closely interdependent with someone else’s. It’s hard in that case to objectively figure out how to hold people accountable.

Lencioni contends that publishing clear goals, having simple progress review and some team rewards will combat this.

I feel that this is truly in the hands of management. If management does not hold themselves accountable, why will the team? If management sets the right example, good things will follow.

The last tendency is “inattention to results”. This happens when individual goals are valued higher than the group goals. Solving this is hard, but Lencioni’s suggests having individual goals align with the larger company goals. This way everyone is at least marching the same direction.

Of Lencioni’s books, I liked this one the most. It’s a quick read, but I would recommend skipping past the fable to the meat of the discussion in the last chapter. I found when reading the last chapter it was very helpful to think of my own experiences as he’s describing the dysfunctions. It helped me relate to the ideas and understand exactly why they are important.

Flight of the Night Hawks is the most recent book from Raymond Feist. It follows his usual formula for books: young men move around the world and become adults while becoming involved with the established characters. It’s just a basic fantasy book and it mostly propped up by his other works, established characters and the author’s reputation. I think if an unknown author would have written this book, it probably would have been a flop.

That being said, I did enjoy reading it. Specifically, I enjoyed seeing more of characters that I discovered around 15 years ago; it’s a like a pleasant trip down memory lane. It was a very quick read, as there isn’t much complexity to the plot or the characters (compared to someone like Robert Jordan).

Since the book is latest in a long, long series of books, there were bound to be some plot inconsistencies, but in this book they were very distracting. I’m glad that I got this book from the library, because I’m pretty sure that I won’t read it again. I think I’d prefer to read Feist’s earlier works like Magician, and the Serpent War saga.

Death by Meeting is another one of Patrick Lencioni’s fable-style business books. It basically describes how to make meetings efficient and valuable rather than boring and tedious.

Most people in “executive roles” (whether the traditional sense or the sense of people that “execute” and make things happen) say “I love my job, but I hate going to meetings”. Lencioni points out that this is like a professional athlete saying, “I love my job, but I hate playing in games.”

Basically people who lead and manage don’t really do anything tangible; meetings are pretty much it. So it’s critical that this time is spent wisely and efficiently.

Of course, lots of people (especially at the low levels of an organization) fall into the fallacy that if they are in meetings all the time they are accomplishing things. These are the people that show you they are triple-booked all day from 8 am to 7 pm and expect you to be impressed. In reality, if you need that many meetings you’re most likely not effective and hurting your team. If each meeting isn’t achieving a tangible result, it’s a waste.

The fable in this book is mostly useless, as it blends the fable with the student/teacher style. To make the book longer, the teacher is learning as he teaches, so we get some unnecessary iterations.

There are just a few simple points in the book and I didn’t learn anything new:

• Meetings need to have “drama” and “conflict”. In reality this means you need to have engaging back and forth discussion. This is rarer nowadays because important decisions are made in private discussions before the meeting occurs. In my work, I will almost always have consensus on the bulk of a controversial topic going into the meeting, and then use that time to discuss some of the details. Ideally, I could do it all in the meeting, but today’s corporate culture expects meetings to be tedious so people are not expecting to have detailed discussions and are engrossed in reading their email.

• Meetings need contextual structure. In addition to having agendas, you need to have different types of meetings for the issues at hand. Lencioni recommends the following: Daily Check-in (five minutes), Weekly tactical (quick round the room, metrics/progress update, real-time agenda based on the preceding items), Monthly Strategic (single topic, analyze, debate, decision making), Off-site Review (Strategy Review, Team Review, Personnel Review, Competitive Review). Obviously, this needs to be modified depending the type of team you’re leading.

• Good meetings (with clarity, closure, and buy-in) will reduce the amount of running around, emails, and general confusion you need to deal with. If the information is communicated clearly in the first place, it saves a lot of time down the road.

I have the same recommendation for this as The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive: “The book is a very quick read (under an hour), so in that sense it’s probably worth reading. If you take a few notes as you read, there’s no need to re-read it.”

Business books seem to fall into one of three categories:

1. Memoir style – the author gives an auto-biographical re-telling of his career and what he thinks are the important lessons from it. Jack Welch’s Winning fits in this category.
2. Student/Teacher style – a protagonist hits hard times and a super-intelligent teacher patiently teaches him. This style generally has a number of back and forth conversations with the student asking simple questions and the teacher pontificating for pages at a time. Robin Sharma’s Leadership Wisdom from the Monk Who Sold His Ferrari (and Scott Adam’s God’s Debris) are both this style.
3. Fable style – very simple concept described through an occasionally entertaining story.

Patrick Lencioni’s The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive is the fable style. I didn’t find the fable very important to communicating the content, but without the fable, Lencioni would have had about 20 pages of text.

The story (good executive makes a bad hire who almost takes down the company…) was interesting for the “behind-the-scenes” look at executive politics, but unfortunately that wasn’t really the point of the book.

The four points are:

1. Build and Maintain a Cohesive Leadership Team – know each other’s strengths and weaknesses, have good open discussions, hold each other accountable, and commit to decisions once they are made.
2. Create Organizational Clarity – specifics around why your business exists, what values are important, who your competitors are, your products’ differentiation, and your execution plans and responsibilities.
3. Over-Communicate Organization Clarity – repetition, simplicity, multiple mediums, cascading messaging.
4. Reinforce Organizational Clarity through Human Systems – make sure that your value are reflected in your hiring, firing, and performance management (including rewards and recognition)

None of this is really rocket science, though I’ve found it’s much harder said then done. The interesting thing I found was consequences of not doing this stuff.

Corporate politics are a reality and basically impossible to eliminate; the strategy should be to minimize politics as much as possible. Having clear organizational goals and areas of ownership will help a lot. In a company where multiple teams are working on the same project, there will be ridiculous amounts of politics as the teams fight for turf and resources.

Or consider a company where the “worker-bees” are rated against a value-system that management is clearly not following or even being evaluated against. Morale will obviously be a problem in that company.

I wish that Lencioni would have included some hard data supporting his premise or at least describing real companies that do this well. Without this, I feel that the book is not complete. The book is a very quick read (under an hour), so in that sense it’s probably worth reading. If you take a few notes as you read, there’s no need to re-read it.

Yes, we got our professional wedding pictures in recently and, yes, they are awesome! I’m working on creating a small wedding site, so that Crissy and I can share a virtual wedding album and storybook with everyone.

I’m also sorting through the thousands of photos and will be uploading a bunch shortly.

In the meantime, you can enjoy these two pictures, which are two of my favorites. While Crissy is always beautiful, our photographer was so talented that she was able to make me look (almost) handsome! The picture on the right looks like it could almost be in a bridal magazine. :-)

I recently read through bits and pieces of Parallel and Distributed Programming Using C++ because I wanted to brush up on some parallel computing concepts. Given how important this topic is now, I was surprised to find very few books written on this topic.

In software, we’re finding that our free lunch is pretty much over. As long as processors (and the rest of the system) got faster and faster, we didn’t have to do anything to make our software faster, rather just go along for the ride. In fact, it’s pretty common in any software shop to hear, “Sure it’s slow now, but when it ships in 2 years it will be fine, because machines will be a lot faster.”

But now raw processor speed (clock speeds, instruction throughput) is not increasing as much, we’re instead getting more than one processor per chip (multi-threading, multi-core). In order to actually use this, we need to design our programs very differently.

On the hyper-threaded or multi-core processors , I see great performance gains when running two CPU-intensive apps. But when the CPUs are doing tasks that were assumed (but not required) to be serial, I actually see some significant performance loss in some cases in parallel, resulting in some bad cache thrashing.

The challenge is that probably around 5 to 10% of programmers understand and can write good concurrent code. As an industry, we’re going to have to put a lot of effort into training developers and the development of libraries and platforms to abstract a lot of the difficulty away.

Given that background, I was disappointed by the textbook. While it was great for introductions to lots of important topics, I didn’t feel that the depth was sufficient. Aside from the physical book form factor, you could easily get the same information if you Google for it.

I didn’t pay for it (yay for libraries!) and I like to read physical books rather than stare at a screen, so I found the book enjoyable, if not directly applicable to anything I actually do. :-)

I finished reading Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun a couple of weeks ago. I bought this book back in April, and finally got around to reading it since I was in the mood for something quick and fictional. So I took Rising Sun out of the ever-growing “to read” queue and got through it in a few hours. While Crichton’s other works have deep scientific and philosophical discussion, this one was more political and made it a quicker read.

It read pretty fast, with a fairly linear plot. This reminded me of the Da Vinci Code, but Rising Sun is a slightly more realistic fiction. Crichton has a bibliography in the back, implying that the book was pretty well researched. In that way, I found the book to be pretty educational as a window into Japanese culture. I know that a lot of people say Crichton is racist in his portrayal of the Japanese, but I didn’t get that impression. I thought it was a fairly even-handed approach; while it may be inaccurate (I’m not that familiar with Japanese culture), I don’t get the impression that it was written to be misleading.

In the book, the subject of the Japanese buying up American companies and properties and their growing influence is discussed extensively. I had forgotten that this was one of the major political issues at the time (early 90’s). Now the latest fear is the Chinese economic influence over America and we don’t hear as much about the Japanese. I wonder where the balance is between logical, legitimate concern and falling prey to the latest bogeyman.