Delegate or fire

Henrik Jernevad — Mon, 10 May 2010 17:35:59 +0000

You can’t lead a big company at a detailed level. You simply don’t have enough time to grasp all details. You are just human, and your brain cannot handle the complex lives of all people in your organization. But if you’re the CEO, you still have the responsibility for all of these people.

“With great power comes great responsibility”

So, if you can’t do it all yourself, you’re forced to either:

generalize and set broad rules, or
delegate control and responsibility.

The first one is tempting, as you can control people and ensure that they don’t do anything which they should not. The problem is, if you do this, you lower the “consciousness” of yourself and your organization. According to the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition, not taking context into consideration is one of the traits of the novice. And that is just what’s happening here.

On the other hand, if you delegate control to the people who actually deal with the everyday problems, each person can adjust their decisions to the situation at hand. If you don’t trust the people to handle that situation, either learn to trust them or don’t hire them in the first place!

To become better salesmen

Henrik Jernevad — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 16:59:57 +0000

At a lunch recently, I talked with some architects/developers who were a bit concerned about a decision made by the managers and (powerpoint-)architects at their company. The company had decided to go with a middle-ware/database solution from a vendor which I will allow to remain anonymous (let’s just say it’s a very large company who recently acquired another company which develops a very common programming language).

My lunch mates felt that the decision to go with this vendor was not necessarily in the best interest of their company and the technical platform they were developing. Instead, they felt that there were other ways forward which would be better. Some of these ideas included common-sense things such as choosing quality over quantity, working on getting the current code into decent shape, and so on. They also felt that they had been trying to get this message across to management.

Why then did these suggestions not catch on with management, and why did the vendor’s salesmen manage to convince company management to choose them? I don’t have the answers, but I will not let that stop me from sharing my thoughts. I also don’t have all the details on this specific case, so I’ll be a bit more general.

I think that developers and architects have many good ideas on how to build systems, but that we don’t always do a great job of describing these ideas to business people. I think we also sometimes adopt ideas on the basis of liking them, rather than because the idea has been proven over and over again.

All in all, I think we need to become better salesmen — to find better ways to sell our ideas to management. We need to start using the arguments that appeal to them, getting case studies which “prove” our ideas, and creating relevant numbers and charts. We need to tell the business people how much money they can actually save by doing whatever-it-is-we-want-them-to-do. Make it the “safe alternative” to choose our idea. I can only imagine that is what the vendor’s salesmen in the example above did.

Failing that, we need to get a very well-paid management consultant to tell them the same thing. Because in the world of business, the greatness of an idea is proportional to the hourly rate of the person presenting it.

henko.net » Management

Delegate or fire

To become better salesmen