M-am lăsat de fumat. Am slăbit 30 de kilograme. Deci am ceva voință. Dar nu m-am putut vindeca de e-mail.

Comentariile de la un articol recent în HBR parcă erau comentarii de un site despre lăsatul de fumat: toată lumea știe ce trebuie făcut, dar nimeni nu reușește să se lase de fumat.

Aceleași sfaturi le-am văzut și acum 5 ani și acum 10 ani. Și totuși continuăm să fim inundați de e-mailuri în fiecare oră din zi și din noapte. Este clar că nu este o problemă de știință ci de voință:

• Știm că nu e bine să dăm „Reply to All”, dar o facem. Dacă ne acuză cineva că nu comunicăm cu restul colectivului, sau Doamne Ferește! că suntem afectați de secretomanie… Așa că mai bine să trimitem la toată lumea.
• Știm că nu e bine să citim e-mailurile la fiecare 2 minute, dar o facem. Altfel colegii vor crede că suntem leneș, sau că tărăgănam lucrurile și nu ne-am adaptat la societatea modernă care trăiește în timp real. Așa că mai bine ne supărăm pe cei de la IT care au pus intervalul de verificare la 5 minute și continuăm să apăsăm obsesiv pe „Send/Receive”.
• Știm că nu e bine să trimitem e-mail colegului care stă în fața noastră, dar o facem. E mai bine să rămână scris, că cine știe? Și dacă avem ceva rău de zis, putem pune în CC pe cine e nevoie să știe că a dat-o în bară, că doar se apropie evaluările anuale și e liber un singur post de manager … Așa că mai bine îi scriem un email că „Verba volant, scripta manent”.

Probabil că nu vom scăpa niciodată de e-mail, sper totuși că vom reuși să-l facem mai suportabil.

Întotdeauna am fost convins că interacțiunea fizică, față în față nu poate fi suplinită complet de nici un fel de mijloc electronic de interacțiune sau comunicare. Și întotdeauna mi-au lipsit cifrele pentru a dovedi asta.

Astăzi am găsit în cele din urmă dovada. Pe HBR Blog Network, Bob Frisch scrie:

Frequent, informal coordination helps smooth the way to organizational effectiveness, and the personal bonds formed by working nearby can enhance a management team’s working relationships. Formal analysis proves that this positive correlation is real and quite large. Zak Kohane, for instance, took time out from his work in computational genomics to resolve a debate on the subject with his dean at Harvard Medical School. The resulting paper measuring the correlation of distance with the effectiveness of team collaboration is, ironically, one of his most widely discussed. It offers quantitative support for the claim that office proximity significantly affects the quality of collaboration. Essentially, Zak and his collaborators showed, the closer coauthors sat to one another, the more effective the papers were that they jointly produced (as measured by how frequently the studies were cited in later articles). This was so whether the comparison was made between offices within a single building, within buildings on a single campus, or across the three Harvard Medical School campuses in Boston. “If you want people to work together effectively,” Zak concluded in a recent New Yorker article, “these findings reinforce the need to create architectures that support frequent, physical, spontaneous interactions. Even in the era of big science, when researchers spend so much time on the Internet, it’s still important to create intimate spaces.”

Articolul complet aici: Does It Matter Where Your Top Team Sits?

Pentru cei înclinați spre știință comunicarea științifică  a lui Zak Kohane: Does Collocation Inform the Impact of Collaboration?

Acum pot declanșa războiul împotriva teleconferințelor zilnice… Am arma supremă … MWA HA HA!

How many times when we think about stress we think only about negative events? How many time times when we think about resistance to changes we think only about bad changes?

Wikipedia define stress as “the sum of physical and mental responses to an unacceptable disparity between real or imagined personal experience and personal expectations”.

I reminded the hard way about the stress involved in good events. I recently move to a new house. The whole week I was very stressed. In the beginning I don’t understand why: nothing bad was happening. Only the end I realize how much the stress such an event can produce.

We tend to help our people to cope with stress. We design workplaces that minimize stress. We develop change management programs for restructuring or outsourcing projects.

How about helping a coworker who just married to cope with stress? This a case of stress caused by a good event, but still a strong stress. How about helping someone to cope with stress induced by a promotion?

Usually we tend to ignore this kind of events: after all they are good events.

Try this: next time when one coworker passes a major event (especially a good one) apply all that you have learned about copping with stress and change management.

You may be amazed by the results.

For any manger solving problems is an everyday job. One can apply various methodologies. I propose you a simple approach guaranteed to solve all problems:

Ok. Enough joking. Take a look at this post by Carmine Coyote on the Slow Leadership blog:

If the sh*t was a random event, your job as boss is to reassure, comfort, and display undiminished trust and loyalty. Doing anything else proves the asshole bit.

The attitude under stress will show the real character of people. If you can stand up, take your part of the blame then you are a man of character.

If you can protect your people, if you can take the blame of the organization for them then you will earn the loyalty of your people.

What is you problem solving methodology? Leave a comment to tell us.

There are three types of computer science students: the zombie, the academician and the hacker.

The zombie

He feels early the need for more real life action and go out in the wild for a job. Usually they get a job as junior programmers and starts spiting out forms in VB (or Java or .NET or whatever). With little fundamentals they transform soon into zombie programmers. In the extreme version, the zombie knows nothing about algorithms, about system analysis, about how to learn. They may become stuck with a specific technology or programming language.

Eventually they end up as master programmers writing programs like this one (see the master programmer section).

The academician

He takes great pride on their theoretical knowledge. The academician loves to build cathedrals: huge applications, with mountains of specifications and documentation. Unfortunately, a hundred years later when the cathedral is finished, the city is no longer there. Remember La Sagrada Familia? The cathedral construction started in 1880 in an empty field over a mile away from urban Barcelona. Today it’s not finished and stand in the centre of modern Barcelona.
The same thing happens with huge applications: they are never truly finished, and moreover the business changes condemn them to irrelevance.

The hacker

He never really understands “Waterfall” methodologies. He learns and program using “Extreme” methods. He hates cathedrals and love bazaars. He takes college as an opportunity to learn many new things. If teachers do not provide the hacker learns on its own.

He knows the world is changing every day. First thing he learn is how to learn. He is natural born lazy: always looking for simpler ways to accomplish results (see “Guru Hacker” here). If you have the guts, always hire hackers. They will come with solutions, with prototypes, with code reusability.

Our education system does not provide enough real life connections for those in danger of becoming zombies.

Our education system does not provide enough “extreme” learning for academicians and they become cathedral builders.

Our education system does not provide enough challenges for aspiring hackers and they may fail their career by becoming zombies.

PS: What am I? Just an executive…

PPS: This was inspired by excelent post of Kathy Sierra about education on Creating Passionate Users:

The Waterfall Model of education is failing like never before. We need Agile Learning.

Usual staff turnover for white-collar workers is around 3%. In Romania for IT professionals (geeks ) is much higher. I just reviewed figures for my team (120 people): 0,18% for the last 12 months. Not bad, isn’t it?

What makes geeks tick? Are geeks different? Do we need special skills to manage geeks?

I always said that a good people manager can manage any team: geeks or not.

Take a look at Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (quote from Wikipedia):

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is often depicted as a pyramid consisting of five levels: the four lower levels are grouped together as deficiency needs associated with physiological needs, while the top level is termed growth needs associated with psychological needs. While our deficiency needs must be met, our being needs are continually shaping our behavior. The basic concept is that the higher needs in this hierarchy only come into focus once all the needs that are lower down in the pyramid are mainly or entirely satisfied. Growth forces create upward movement in the hierarchy, whereas regressive forces push prepotent needs further down the hierarchy.

Read Linus book “Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary“:

There are three things that have meaning for life. They are the motivational factors for everything in your life – for anything that you or any living thing does: The first is survival, the second is social order, and the third is entertainment. Everything in life progresses in that order.

The higher the abstract level of a job the higher is the importance of the upper level motivational factors. Geeks happen to work at a very abstract level: computers and anything around them are highly abstract.

After basic work needs (reasonable salary and job security) are fulfilled, geeks place an inordinate amount of importance to other factors: environment, colleagues, management style, type of work, and many other factors.

If you work a lot on other factors can obtain significant savings in his payroll budget: within the right environment you can pay below the market and still enjoy very low turnover.

Do you think this is achievable?