Today’s post continues the Mistakes of Mainstream Management (MMM) series and explores how Silicon Valley executives and managers continue to fall for bogus productivity improvement programs by chasing local efficiencies that don’t help or even hurts the global effectiveness.
Here’s a typical example from a typical Silicon Valley corporation:
The “developer productivity” organization will hand out a promotions and bonuses for its executives and managers while the “information security”, “compliance”, “privacy”, “legal” & other “stakeholder” organizations celebrate the expanded coverage of their manual review of every project.
The end-to-end process from ideation to launch of a new product or feature would have slowed down significantly year-over-year, but hey, the builds are 5 seconds faster.
From /r/ProgrammerHumor
Same story with AI “adoption”. There are several Silicon Valley firms where AI is generating & testing a lot of code super fast, and yet developers continue to suffer through “death by a thousand cuts” processes with stakeholder “reviews” & “approvals” to take it to production, so that a customer can then derive some value from it.
Their AI adoption strategy in four words: “Hurry Up and Wait”.
One way to snap them out of their “local optimization” hang-over is to tell stories (Pro-tip": Incentive caused bias can cause executives to be blind to the pain they are inflicting on the company with their good intentions). This is where Eliyahu Goldratt comes into the picture.
Goldratt is the originator of the Theory of Constraints and the author of several best selling books including The Goal, which is one of three books that Jeff Bezos made his top execs read. While it would be misleading to apply the insights from the book to a complex socio-technical system like a software development organization that’s filled with purposeful human actors, I applaud him for his approach.
The Goal is actually a novel. Goldratt knew his customer base well - many managers/leaders don't read books! Even if they did, it is only novels. That's why he wrote business books as novels!