As an aside for anyone who’s technical and wants to understand how most corporations work, read “Effective Executive.” It’s from the 60’s but is still very relevant.
It (more or less) is “how to be a knowledge worker.”
Re knowledge worker and its challenges: a HBR article had a nice comic succinctly describing part of the challenge.
Imagine the boss walking down the hall with offices w/half glass doors both sides so you can see in.
In one office Bob is hard at it on the phone. In another office Carl is lost in thought looking at reports. In a third office chuck has got his feet up on the desk thinking.
The caption (of the boss' thoughts) read: I wonder what they're doing?
This contrasts with manufacturing. The brake guy is on the brake line doing brake stuff. Period.
Maybe bob, Carl, Chuck are doing the boss' ask, maybe not. Maybe they're trying to get it right inspite of the boss or not.
Going back to drucker's book he makes a strong point. He says it used to be to make money you come up with a product (oil, milk, wd40, dish soap, tin foil) and put you the smart people on design and manufacturing management. The rest are merely warm hands. Here's there is a concentration of talent in one place.
Not so in knowledge work. To get anything done you need teams to work cross functionally to combine spealists. It's a different ballgame.
Apple for example has good cross functional management lining up apps + hw + os + manufacturing supply chain. A apple guy interviewed by Charlie rose said that's apple's real secret sauce. Yes, industrial design form is sweet, but that's not the secret sauce, in fact.
Nah. Look at this way. Drucker is like going to university. It's a mirror. If you're nothing, just passing through, and have no substance that's how the university or Drucker will feel. Meanwhile there's a whole bunch of people who know a good thing when they see it.
See my post upvoted 3 times below re: apple, HBR article, and cross functional management. Implied in cross functional management is: who's your customer?
Specific example:
I worked on a team (major NYC financial provider 15K+ people) with extremely heavy use of Oracle. There was a separate DBA team that setup, maintained DBs, and owned all the schema passwords and did rollouts.
I made over several attempts very specific requests to the DBA TL on what our team needed. The DBA TL yes-ed me to death then told me about his solution. I explained why that was a non starter --- all this 1:1.
Later during a team meeting he opened with we'll do what I asked for --- so it he said --- then proceeded for the next 1hr talking again about his vision. I had none of it.
He was upset and escalated to management. So now I'm in a 3-way with my boss and his boss and they're reading me the riot act. Then my boss said, well, I guess he has his own vision of what to do. That was the break I needed. I made stunningly clear the following points:
1. We're the customer. We're the ones with ultimate accountability to paying external customers. We tell the internal service supplier if their product is good, and whether or not its worth the time of day. They don't tell us. We tell them our requirements. They don't tell us.
2. I had to remind them that in commercial transactions outside of corporate America, the customer is in charge because the customer has the checkbook (well, for those who have a backbone). And the supplier needs to be minimally mindful of customer satisfaction or else they're fired, legal action etc. etc.
3. But in corporate America internal service suppliers have management's implicit buy-in. Internal customers can't shop around or do it themselves. They're stuck with the internal suppliers like it or not. And that gives political players and stupid people the upper hand even though we're still paying for their salary, machines, and oracle licenses through our team's revenues.
4. I expected management to convey that to the DBA lead, and comply with our team's requirements.
The boss' boss sat there confused.
So I said this: wanna know why some companies move IT into the cloud? Because first tech people get sick and tired of the crappy internal suppliers. Over a few years, slow/bad internal service leads to too many business delays. And after a while business guys with budget get pissed. Then they announce: cloud.
That finally sunk in, and the DBA TL was chastised. But it was a cost to me.
See? Internal customer, internal service supplier is cross functional management is about the proper way teams should work together to satisfy internal customers and transitively external customers.
Where did I get that from: The Executive by Drucker.
Let me close this way: I absolutely learned nothing of any substance from managers in NYC finance. I learned this gem from a book. The rest I mainly owe to a manager in VA, and my first boss (UC Berkeley Chem-Eng) in Silicon Valley. But then again I know a good thing when I see it.
When I read these leadership stories you never hear from the persons they led. Only from other "leaders" or consultants. I have been in enough presentations where leaders bragged about their achievements but I knew that reality was quite different.
I think this is the first management/leadership post on here that I enjoyed reading. I've watched conventional industry/MBA-style techniques being forced onto the arts community (for example) with bad results. It does seem like different cultures could use different leadership approaches.
I submitted this to HN and surprised it resonated with folks! Most of David Epstein's writing is fun, curious, exploratory, and useful just like this post
As an aside for anyone who’s technical and wants to understand how most corporations work, read “Effective Executive.” It’s from the 60’s but is still very relevant.
It (more or less) is “how to be a knowledge worker.”