Archive for December, 2008

Principles of War as Applied to Business Leadership – Part 2

Wednesday, December 31st, 2008

 

This is the second on our two part post on the Principles of War and our interpretation of them relative to the business world.  The 9 US Principles of War (derived from von Clausewitz’s essay “Principles of War” and his book “On War”) are Objective, Offensive, Mass, Economy of Force, Maneuver, Unity of Command, Security, Surprise and Simplicity.  We will discuss the last four of these in this post.

Unity of Command.  The US Armed Forces definition is that for each objective, there should be a single owner or commander and that the forces necessary to achieve that objective should be placed under the authority of that commander.  In the business world, this does not mean that you should slice your technology, client services and product teams into separate groups under each general manager or objective owner.  Rather, it means that the person responsible for achieving some business objective should have the authority to direct the resources necessary to achieving that goal.  These resources could be set up in project teams that respond to the needs of the objective owner, or they could be “dotted lined” to the individual.  The key here is that for any objective there should be a clearly defined and empowered owner of the objective.  

 

Security.  Security enhances freedom of action by reducing vulnerability to hostile acts, influence or surprise.  While you may jump immediate to “information and technology security” implemented as policies within firewalls and such, we believe this has a much broader meaning.  Portions of this principle speak to your actions and efforts to get early warning of competitive threats – not just the threats afforded by hackers and the like.  What are you doing in an ethical fashion to find out how your competitors are responding to your actions?  How do you monitor the strategies and products of your competitors?  How well do you know your competition?

 

Surprise.  Strike the enemy at a time or place or in a manner for which he (or she) is unprepared.  This principle is the hardest to achieve within the business world, but can have incredible results when it is in fact achieved.  Surprise is achieved when a struggling computer company releases a portable personal music device such as Apple did with the iPod.  Sony, the creator of the portable music device phenomenon was taken completely by surprise and had previously never even considered Apple a competitor.  Surprise, therefore, does not have to be a principle you apply to those you currently consider to be your competitors – it can be applied to markets tangent to the ones in which you currently operate.  Surprise can also manifest itself as a change in approach such as Nintendo’s approach with the Wii.  While Microsoft and Sony focused on more complex graphics and processors, Nintendo took the surprise approach of using less sophisticated graphics and processing power (thereby offering a lower initial price) and focused their approach on a revolutionary game controller (the Wii Nunchuk and motion system). 

 

Simplicity.  Prepare clean, uncomplicated plans and concise instructions that ensure thorough understanding.   This is perhaps the most easily understood within the business context of all the principles of war.  Simply stated, you need to make sure your plans, orders, and objectives are understood by all parties and are unambiguous.

Summarizing the nine principles from our two posts, then leave us with 9 Principles of Business in a slightly restated fashion:

 

  1. Create Clearly Defined Aggressive But Achievable Goals (Objective)
  2. Be First to Market and Aggressive in Your Implementation (Offensive)
  3. Align Your Companies Organizations with Your Objectives (Mass)
  4. Employ Your Teams and Organizations in Accordance with Their Capabilities (Economy of Force)
  5. Maintain Business Flexibility but Do Not Oscillate Constantly (Maneuver)
  6. Clearly Define Ownership of Objectives and Empower those Individuals (Unity of Command)
  7. Sense and Respond to your Competition (Security)
  8. Surprise your competition with your timing or approach (Surprise)
  9. Constantly Communicate and Simplify Your Plans (Simplicity)

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Principles of War as Applied to Business Leadership – Part 1

Sunday, December 21st, 2008

 

Many authors have previously described the relationship between business and war and we believe that the most successful businesses approach their operations as would General Douglas MacArthur when he claimed that “In war, there is no substitute for victory”.

Carl von Clausewitz offered several tenets of war in his essay “Principles of War” and later expanded upon those in his book “On War”.  Many armed forces throughout the world have taken portions of these tenets and adopted them for their own use.  This post is the first in a two part series relating the 9 US Armed Forces Principles of War to your everyday business activities, strategy and tactics.  The 9 US Principles of War are Objective, Offensive, Mass, Economy of Force, Manuever, Unity of Command, Security, Surprise and Simplicity.  We will discuss the first 5 in this post and the next 4 in a subsequent post.

Objective.  The US Armed Forces definition is to direct every military operation toward a clearly defined, decisive and attainable objective.  We think this is pretty self explanatory and includes concepts about which we’ve previously blogged such as the need to set aggressive but achievable goals.  The most important aspects of “Objective” as applied to your business are for your goals to be clearly defined, well understood, measurable and attainable.

Offensive.  The military definition is to seize, retain and exploit the initiative.  The business definition here is found by looking at what Offensive implies – specifically that it’s all about time to market and getting the right features, products and services out and adopted first.  Being first offers the best chance at achieving virility within the market, and creating a viral marketplace or product is the military equivalent of seizing the high ground.

Mass.  The military definition is to mass the overwhelming effects of combat power at the decisive place and time.  Mass here in military terms is different from the concentration of forces which may not be desirable.  Combat power refers to all the aspects of military power from infantry and armor, to field artillery and other combat multipliers. The business equivalent is to ensure that your business units are aligned with your greater business objective and that they are contributing to it properly.  Your technology, product, marketing and finance teams should all realize and be contributing to the core objectives necessary to win your business battle.  If you wish to win quickly, they cannot be marching to separate agendas and they should not be fighting with each other.

Economy of Force.  This one can be confusing, but within the military definition is a reference to “No part of the force should be left without a purpose”.  The military definition also hints that every part of the force should be used in the most effective way possible.  Goals and objectives are again part of this, but more importantly you should be able to answer the question of whether you are using the right team for the job at hand.  Not only should you ensure that every organization has a purpose directly relating to your most important initiatives, you need to ensure that they are the best team to have those specific goals and objectives.  Client Services and Customer Support teams might be useful in helping to QA new products but allocating them 100% to such an endeavor is probably not the most leveraged use of their time.  Conversely, forgetting to include Customer Support or Client Services in any product rollout is a failure to employ a very important part of your “combat power” in achieving product success.  While its useful for engineers to understand customer needs and complaints, allowing more than 5 to 10% of their time to be taken up by such activities is a costly endeavor relative to your future product needs.

Maneuver. Place the enemy in a position of disadvantage through the flexible application of combat power.  This one relates to how flexible you are in your product delivery lifecycle, and whether you are set up to respond to your competitors actions in the marketplace.  This IS NOT an argument that you should abandon products in flight and constantly change your strategy.  Constant change in strategy is a clear indication of a management team incapable of defining a winning path and it’s a early indication of likely future failure.  You should be flexible, and changing features or making course corrections a few times a year is appropriate.  Ensuring that your product delivery processes allow you the flexibility to change (with the additional cost that implies) is critical to success.  But constant change is not a strategy – it’s a recipe for disaster.

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Foster Creativity

Monday, December 15th, 2008

With the economic downturn in full force, you are probably spending a great deal of time thinking about how to cut cost, reprioritize revenue generating features, or delivering more in 2009 with less resources.  You might think now is not the time to care about “creativity” and “energy” but we think this it is even more important.  Having a team that is fully engaged with all of their creative forces focused on your business is crucial to achieve any of those other objectives.  The way to achieve this is by creating an environment where people know where they stand in terms of performance, get to own deliverables, can openly question decisions or standards, and show each other respect.  

 

A couple ideas that we have either read about or seen in practice in organizations are team or individual training events, four day work weeks, allocated time to work on personal interests, self selection of features/stories, and mentoring.  Training can take the shape of many different forms including formal classes at universities, external workshops (WARNING: self-promotional plug….such as our Technology Workshop), or internal classes taught to each other by members of the team.  Everyone knows different things, sharing this knowledge is good for both the team as well as the presenter, giving her practice explaining technical items verbally  and ensuring she knows the subject completely.  

Mentoring is another low cost method of helping foster a more open and creative environment.  Pairing junior and senior engineers together provides both parties the opportunity to practice different skills.  Additionally, it helps facilitate what are likely two different groups to begin a dialog.  Mentoring can be extended in many different forms.  Ask the CEO to take a different engineer as a mentee each quarter, meeting with them for lunch or breakfast every second or third week for the quarter.  This is a great way to remind the top executive to appreciate the engineers and gets engineers exposure to the business challenges that the CEO faces daily, a real win-win proposition.

Some of the more radical approaches for developing a creative environment are already well documented by some very popular companies including Google and 37Signals.  If you haven’t read the 37Signals book, we recommend this as a great source of ideas for fostering a creative and unique environment for your team.

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To Log or Not To Log?

Monday, December 8th, 2008

That is the question that has caused debate for many years among operations and engineering staffs.  We’ve recently read a couple very well written and well thought out articles on this topic and wanted to offer our ideas on the debate.  The first article is by Todd Hoff from HighScalability.com who advocates in Log Everything All the Time, as the title implies, that everything should be logged for potential use.  Todd has another article describing Facebook’s open source Scribe, Product: Scribe – Facebook’s Scalable Logging System, where he observes the fact that Facebook must agree with his logging approach by virtue of their development of this product.  The other article titled, The Problem With Logging by Jeff Atwood of CodingHorror.com, argues for a more tempered approach.  Jeff summarizes his position as “Start small and simple, logging only the most obvious and critical of errors.”  

 

Our position is squarely in the camp of log everything but with a few caveats.  These ignore-at-your-application’s-peril cautions are 1) logging must not impede the performance of the application 2) use a common framework and 3) look at the data.  Let’s go through these one at a time.

 

1) Logging must not impede the performance of the application – As Jeff points out, “logging isn’t free” and we agree with that but we would add that the potential benefit of the data outweighs the resource cost, unless it negatively affects performance.  Get ready for one of our repeating themes:  Do it if the BUSINESS benefit of logging outweighs the cost of logging.  Most web / application servers are not utilized completely because most teams don’t know precisely the performance parameters and resource constraints of their application, especially as it changes with each release.  If you are fortunate enough to be in an organization that really understands the bottlenecks and performance of the application on specific hardware, more than likely there is a single resource that is the bottleneck, i.e. memory, i/o, or CPU.  Your logging service should not put further demand on a constrained resource, all surpluses are fair game.  And what should go without saying is all logging must be done asynchronously.  Losing a log event is acceptable but impacting a transactional event is not.

2) Use a common framework – Chose or build a common framework that is used throughout the application and that includes common definitions.  Just like definitions of Priorities and Severity for bugs are defined, logging definitions must be determined and adhered to.  Code reviews are a way to ensure common usage.  Data being sent to five different files in different formats defeat the purpose of logging, common usage, format, gathering, and analysis is where the payoff is realized.

3) Look at the data – Logging tons of data, and when we says tons think of Scribe that claims to handle 10’s of billions of messages each day, looking at this data is completely overwhelming.  But looking through some mechanism automated or manual is mandatory for the benefit to be gained.  As Todd points out there are products like Hadoop to help process the data into viewable and actionable information.  Jeff makes the point that “the more you log, the less you find”, but our point is that by the time you know you have a problem and need to inject logging you’re too late.  Properly logging and analyzing of the data will identify the problems early and make diagnosis easier.  We think products such as SCAMP application monitoring software are excellent for creating an easy way of seeing inside the application.

 

As long as you avoid the pitfalls stated above, we feel that logging can be a very beneficial addition to your quality assurance, scalability, availability initiatives.  We highly encourage you to read all the articles cited, both HighScalability and  CodingHorror are on our must-read list of blogs that we subscribe to.  As always let us know what you think.  I’m sure we have not heard that last of this great debate.

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Startups and the Manic-Depressive CEO

Monday, December 1st, 2008

If you are one of those people who think that a startup consists of a couple of years of hard work followed by a large payout, think again. Most venture backed companies never make it to that payout and those that do often take much longer than two years to do it. Furthermore, those “years”, be they 2 or 10, are very stressful years packed with a roller coaster ride of emotions that any theme park would be proud to call its own.

 

Life in a startup, especially an early stage startup, is full of ups and downs. On Monday you are on top of the world, having signed a new customer and released an enhancement to your base product; champagne corks pop and party hats are worn by all. By Wednesday you fear that the most recent release from one of your competitors will be the end of your business and you hold an all night product roadmap session to re plan how you will spend the rest of your product manpower and budget through the course of the year.

 

In our experience, the entrepreneurial CEO most often has the greatest emotional amplitude in the highs and lows and the resulting incredible mood swings are not healthy for the company on either the euphoric peak or the abysmal trough. Behaviors and actions vary so widely in many young CEOs that the organization simply cannot react optimally to them. For instance, during the peak, the CEO talks about the IPO, high-fives and knuckles the team and takes them out for drinks. Within three days, people are hearing of layoffs, cut backs and certain business death. During the highs, the CEO talks about what a stellar team he or she has and during the lows he or she complains how no one really works hard enough and how no one cares about the success of the company.

 

Sound familiar?  If it does, listen closely.  YOU MUST STOP!  If you want to lead, then you must be the pillar of the company in both good times and bad.  Don’t let yourself believe that you get a pass on this advice just because its “the way you work”.  Don’t be an enabler of yourself in behaviors that run counter to creating shareholder value.  You must absolutely be the firm guiding hand in good times that reminds the company that there is still a fight for survival going on even as the celebration reaches its crescendo and you must embody the hope that the company seeks in bad times by reassuring them of the strategy and how exactly it will be successful against the competition.

 

While we agree that flexibility of strategy especially in the ability to sense and respond to competition is a key to success, we argue that changing strategy weekly is a lack of strategy and you are suffering from IotD (Idea of the Day) as we discuss in a previous article.   Making course corrections through the year to capitalize on a competitor’s weaknesses or to defend against a competitor’s attacks is absolutely appropriate.  Holding all night sessions the day after a competitor’s release, especially given that the development cycle for any product course correction will likely dwarf the hasty strategy development time is ludicrous and fraught with perils such as a lack of competitive information and a complete lack of an appropriate product discovery phase.

 

What are the lessons for each of you in this?  For the entrepreneurial CEO, recognize this ride is going to happen and monitor your reactions to the highs and lows.  Be the leader for your organization and keep a level head in front of your teams so they can remain focused on delivery.  If you’ve been complaining lately about how nothing ever gets done and no one cares enough about the company, look inward and ask if you aren’t the one causing this problem.  For the CTOs, recognize this behavior in your boss and don’t jump on board the rollercoaster.  Try to get your CEO to read this article, and if that fails, just keep reminding them to stay the course.  The upside if you resist is that you are being the leader your team needs to buffer them from the whipsaw and tomorrow the CEO will probably change his or her mind back again.  For the engineers, ask during the interview how focused the team is and how long projects are given to complete.  If they brag that they change product strategy everyday to keep up with the competition consider this a warning sign.  If they are contemplative, understanding the true cost of changing direction, and reactive only after a well thought out discussions, then consider those as good signs of a mature leadership team.

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