I read a fascinating piece on the economic impact self-driving cars and trucks will have and it’s not a pretty sight.  A quick glance at this map showing the most common job in each state makes it clear:

The most common job in each state in 2014…

You don’t have to study the map very long to conclude automating truck driving away as a way of life is going to have a profound effect on our economy.  When you consider that truck drivers make an average of $40,000 a year, which is more than almost half of all tax payers, and you add in all the jobs related to the truck driving industry, it may be one of the biggest impacts we see in our lifetimes.

Can this really happen?  When will it happen?

The article goes on to show that the world’s first driverless truck has already hit the road in Nevada, and was built by Mercedes Benz.  They present estimates from a variety of sources that suggest somewhere between 2020 and 2030 completely autonomous trucks will begin to take over by storm.  Google has demonstrated self-driving vehicles and Teslas have the capability already built in to cars already on the road.

All of the proponents of driverless vehicles are loudly trumpeting that the vehicles are safer, cheaper, and more fuel efficient.  But what they’re not considering is the impact on the economy.  What will all the truck drivers that lose their jobs do to earn a living?  Who will benefit?

As it stands, large organizations that can afford to buy driverless vehicles will be the beneficiaries and nobody has a plan for what will happen to the truck drivers.

This looks like the third tranche of job-destroying disruption.  The other two–the destruction of Retail jobs first by firms like Walmart and later by the Internet, and the Offshoring and Automation of Manufacturing jobs, are well underway.  The economy is still limping in the wake of the Great Recession, and it’s tough to say we’re out of the woods except for the most dyed in the wool political supporters who want to claim victory for their side.  Meanwhile, Main Street America is braced and wondering what the next big shock to the Middle Class will be.

The article argues its time to get some sort of Basic Income plan in place to provide a Safety Net.  Safety Nets are fine, but I want to know how the Middle Class can do better than a Safety Net.  A vibrant Middle Class does not sit at home waiting for its next Government Safety Net check to do something.  A vibrant Middle Class has hopes, dreams, and upward mobility. Those are all things a Safety Net can’t cover–only Opportunity can provide hope or fulfill dreams.

It’s time to start Taxing the Robots, Not the People.

If the Robots are going to take over more and more of the economy to the detriment of the People and the benefit of those few who can own thousands of Robots, why not tax the Robots?  In fact, why not look at any practice that wholesale destroys lots of jobs as being worthy of taxes to pay for programs to help those who’ve been displaced?

If we look at it that way, there are several areas to think about applying progressive taxes:

–  Taxes on automation and robots

–  Taxes on offshoring jobs

–  Taxes on monopolies that take over markets and then use their unfair influence to gut jobs by destroying all competition

These taxes will automatically be progressive.  They will help balance the playing field so that progress can still come, but there are costs that result in funds to help those displaced by progress.  We don’t want to eliminate the progress, we just want to even out some of the unfairness that comes when we let progress run completely roughshod.

So far, we’ve done very much the opposite, which is part of our problem.  Our system makes hiring more expensive not less.  However good its intentions, Obamacare is a net job reducer because businesses have to pay for it based on how many employees they have.  What if instead they paid based on how many robots, or on how many jobs they had offshored?

There’s been such a massive transfer of wealth that clearly there is money to pay for such programs.  Much more than enough.  While we’re at it, we should be exempting smaller businesses from such programs.  It’s been well proven that Small Businesses are the engines of job creation and growth.  As a nation, we’re sold on the idea of more and more progressive taxes for people, but we have left off progressive taxes for businesses.

We have a tax system that allows 43% of Americans to pay no Federal Income Tax.  Why not a system that allows the smallest 43% of businesses to pay no taxes?  That would dramatically level the playing field and re-ignite Small Business growth.

So, in a nutshell, what we could do to offset a continuing economic disaster for the Middle Class would be:

1.  Tax Robots, Offshoring, and Monopolies so that organizations involved with these practices have the highest tax rates

2.  Radically lower taxes for Small Business.  Some meaningful fraction of them shouldn’t have to pay taxes at all.  Perhaps not 43%, but certainly the 20% or so smallest business.  Make up that lost revenue by increased taxes on larger businesses.

3.  Make #1 and #2 net positive tax revenue generators to allow for new programs.

4.  Put a solid Safety Net in place.

5.  Stimulate the Small Business economy with what’s left.  In addition to Radically Lower Small Business Taxes, we should increase the availability of Small Business Loans and we should make Education cheaper.  The latter will make it easier for those whose jobs were automated away to retrain as well as ensuring an increasing pool of talented labor.

The biggest obstacle in all this thinking is that currently, the people calling the shots in terms of lobbying and poltiical contributions are precisely the ones we propose to have pay for these new programs with new taxes.

How will we ever break out of that cycle?

Even Seth Godin flushes out the Apple Fan Boys sometimes.  David Terrar has an, “I disagree with Seth Godin,” post going.  Seth’s premise, as set forth in, “Decoding Apple as a luxury tools company,” is that eventually, as a company builds a luxury brand, they must choose between luxury and utility or be trumped by another luxury brand that did make the choice.

I’ll cut to the chase–Seth is right and David is wrong to disagree.  Now I’ll explain.

David Gives The Best Counter-Examples to His Own Position

He talks about Patagonia being able to continue on utility and still function as a luxury brand.  But that misses the nuance of Godin’s article.  Patagonia is trumped by Louis Vuitton and countless others precisely because they were focused entirely on luxury with no need for any utility-seeking compromises.

He askes whether Ferrari, Bentley, Bugatti, or Aston Martin compromise their engineering in the interests of luxury, and suggests that of course they do not.  Au contrare, David, aucontrare.  At the risk of mobilizing both the legions of Apple Fan Boys and still more fans of these fine marques, they do compromise engineering.  Enzo Ferrari used to purposefully limit the performance of his street vehicles because he didn’t feel his customers were competent to drive cars with greater potential.

This practice didn’t stop when the Old Man checked out.  Every Ferrari I’ve owned or driven compromised all sorts of handling performance in the interest of greater comfort.  They love that light steering feel and the cars are ever so much more supple over bumps because of course we need to protect the delicate posteriors of our customers.  Luxury?  Absolutely.

Much the same can be said of Bentley, Bugatti, and yes, Aston Martin.  Their cache is exclusivity or outrageousness, not fine engineering.  We may as well lump Lamborghini into all that, if need be.  McClaren?  The jury is still out on that one for me, perhaps there is one shining exception.  Or indeed, perhaps individual models (F40) escape.  But overall, these auto brands are great examples.  Mercedes and Porsche are luxurious, but they are not apex luxury like these other cars.  They have much better engineering and bring more innovations to the table.  Heck, the lowly Corvettes have Utility advantages over many of these cars and are at best low-end luxury.

Watches?  Don’t get me started.  The luxury time pieces favor mechanical movements.  My Rolex loses time every day compared to a decent Swatch.  But it just wouldn’t be right to stick a quartz movement into a luxury watch like the Rolex, Patek, or name-your-expensive-Swiss-timepiece-here.  So they don’t, and have therefore done something to benefit their luxury status to the detriment of their utility functionality.  You could argue they’ve abandoned Utility altogether from any objective measure of what the Utility of a wrist watch ought to be.

Must Apple Do This?  Has Apple Already Done This?

So far, I think most agree that while Apple may have flirted with sacrificing Utility for Luxury, they haven’t actually crossed that line decisively.  There are certainly needless dogmatic issues that drive anyone transitioning from a PC crazy.  I have True Apple Fan Boy friends that only use their Macs with PC keyboards and PC mice.  It seems they want real <Del> keys, <Home>, <End>, scrolling mouse wheels, more buttons and all that jazz that Apple mysteriously refuses to give them.  In the past there have been missing fans and arrow keys that were again nods to Luxury versus Utility.  But Apple backed away from them.  Perhaps they’ll fix their keyboards and mice too.

These things happen because part of being apex luxury is ignoring customers.  After all, you are the infallible arbiters of style.  What you produce is by definition better than what anyone else produces.  What could a mere customer possibly have to tell Louis Vuitton about how to make more luxurious cases?

Yes, it’s arbitrary, dogmatic, and a chase your tail kind of tautology.  But that’s the nature of Luxury and Style versus Utility and Function.  It starts with how the brand is judged, and it would be hard to argue that Apple doesn’t see themselves firmly in the Luxury versus Utility side of the judgement game.  They don’t consider anyone worthy of judging their products.

What About the Ecosystem?

We shouldn’t leave this whole Luxury/Utility dichotomy without touching on the issue of ecosystems.  Luxury goods don’t have them.  Utility goods do.  There can be little question that ecosystems add utility value, though they can also add complexity and other pain.  My Macs plug and play with, well whatever they’re willing to plug and play with.  My PC’s plug into vastly more things but very often they don’t play very well once plugged in.

Apple has sharply limited their ecosystem to that which they strictly control.  In so doing, they have made some choices not unlike the Godin quote:

When Apple dumbs down Pages or Keynote or allows open bugs to fester for months or years, they’re taking the luxury path at the expense of the tools path.

Consider the whole approval cycle for their App Store ecosystem.  They will argue it is there to protect users from junk apps.  I’d argue it’s more about closing Apple’s ecosystem so it cannot threaten them in any way and so they can maximize their profits from it.  Here’s what I mean about the Godin quote being close to home:

One of the great advantages of SaaS is keeping everyone on the same release and making sure that release can be quickly and easily upgraded.  I surveyed Enterprise Software Customer Service one time and discovered that companies estimated that 40-70% of bugs in open trouble tickets were fixed in the current release.  That’s how important updates are–they literally keep 40-70% of your customers from even seeing the bug in the first place.

Yet, because we have to protect these  Walled Garden, it may take quite a lot of time and effort to get a new release approved.

To David’s list of brands and the power of ecosystems, I’ll bring in the world of audio.  Bang and Olufsen are beautiful.  They’re luxury.  But are they utility?  Are they the best sounding audio?  They’re all in one and they eschew an ecosystem, but is that really a good thing if you want to maximize their Utility (e.g. Audio Performance)?  No, not really.  And look at how similar B&O are to Apple.  Interesting parallels there.

Is Apple helping their Utility or their Luxury by limiting their ecosystem so much?  At one time, I think they were helping their Utility, but that balance seems to me is shifting more to Luxury.

Godin’s Decoding of Luxury vs Tools is Not Unlike Michael Porter’s Competitive Strategy

I found Godin’s view of the Luxury vs Tools markets to be not unlike Michael Porter’s venerable Competitive Strategy, for those who remember their B-School studies.  Porter argues that there are only 3 successful competitive strategies:

1.  Be the Best.  Here he means “having the most utility” vis a vis Godin’s take.

2.  Be the Cheapest.  This is Microsoft and Dell to Apple’s “Be the Best.”

3.  Serve a Niche that #1 and #2 are under-serving.  This is where the most Luxurious winds up.

Porter suggests that companies need to pick just one of these strategies.  Trying to serve more than one divides your resources and will allow a competitor that focuses on just one of the strategies to beat you.

What often happens to brands that start out to be the Best is they can’t sustain that advantage.  That requires too much engineering inspiration and innovation, which is just not reliably schedulable when you need it.  So instead, they start to flirt with design inspiration, which can be scheduled and in fact is more desirable if things change often because what that audience seeks is distinction.  They relish the opportunity that there is new distinction constantly being made available for their delight.

The situation for Apple is sustaining that pace of innovation.  My Microsoft Surface Pro 3 is a good example.  It’s hardware is absolutely up to Apple’s standards in every respect.  Apple at this time has no notebook tablet.  Will they build one?  Or will they insist that since they are Apple, the world must follow their lead and they will not be following anyone else?

Can there be a MacBook Tablet, or will it go the way of the keyboards and mice, wishing they had the PC functions or worse, suffering the indignity of having PC hardware plugged into the pristine Mac User Experience?

Is Apple selling the Best Technology or Silicon Haute Coutoure for the Well-Monied Gadget Set?

Oh and David, you mention you wished there were comments on Seth Godin’s blog?  I sure wish Medium where your article appeared had them too.

I just finished the Vanity Fair piece on Gates, Ballmer, Nadella, and whether Microsoft can be rebooted to its former glory.  It’s a good article, but it’s all about the past mistakes and there’s little about the future there.  Mostly, it is the account of how two best friends (Gates and Ballmer) broke up over the internal stresses of running Microsoft.  Ballmer characteristically doesn’t accept blame for much (we missed search and phones, but our real problem was the Longhorn project which the article implies he blames equally on Gates) and Gates never really talks much about what went wrong at all.

I’ve written a little bit before about what I see as the problems, but wanted to do a full treatment of it.

Problem number 1:  Microsoft Was Never Agile

Remember the old saw about how Microsoft products were never very good until the 3rd release?  Add to that the notion that the minimum product cycle was about 2 years and often 3 or 4 and you begin to get an idea of just how non-agile the company is. There are claims that this is being fixed, but it is a huge cultural problem to fix.  Microsoft is run by committees chaired by Product Managers and MBA’s.  Those folks are not agile by their very nature, meaning they don’t understand concepts like “Minimum Viable Product” nor how to work off a strictly prioritized agile backlog.  It’s just not how the culture works and it will take Herculean upheavals and new tissue grafts to ever make it very agile.

I’ve been through this conversion on more than one occasion, and it’s never easy.  Unfortunately, the very tenets of agile done right are at odds with how Microsoft makes its decisions.  Gates, Ballmer, and Nadella grew up developing software the Microsoft Way, which is not the Agile Way.  They may pay lip service to Agile, but until they have lived and breathed it, or brought in those new tissue grafts who have lived and breathed Agile, it’ll just be a lot of talk and Microsoft will continue to move far more slowly than Agile competitors.

Problem Number 2:  Microsoft is a Commoditizer, not an Innovator

Microsoft has always been a commoditizer.  They take someone else’s Great Idea, build a high quality facsimile, and sell it under the brand and monopoly umbrella.  That worked well for a long time, but the combination of frictionless product discovery via the Internet, the pace of agile software development, and new business models such as advertising make the role of commoditizer, at least as Microsoft plays it, very difficult.

In the past, people bought the commodity for a couple of reasons that are not nearly as strong today:

–  Brand:  The power of brands has greatly diminished, Microsoft’s brand has become tarnished, and there are many new brands to choose from.  If nothing else has happened during Microsoft’s corporate life, the world has learned that relative unknowns become Big Brands in a very short time.  There’s not nearly the stigma buying lesser names that there used to be. Brand is also about getting noticed, and the increasingly frictionless web has made it easier and easier for upstarts to get noticed.

–  Price:  When I was a General in the Office Wars, Microsoft beat Borland and my Quattro Pro product on price.  It was clever pricing too–who wants to buy individual best of breed products when you can get such a great deal on a suite with everything you need?  Today, Microsoft is hard pressed to be the low cost provider.  Open Source and Advertising Models have completely destroyed that advantage.

–  Interoperability:  This is Microsoft’s last bastion.  We buy Windows because so much that we depend on in terms of applications, data, and hardware needs Windows to function.  But this is not a particularly strong barrier.  It amazes to me that companies like Google haven’t worked harder to eliminate it.

Problem Number 3:  Microsoft is Not Especially Good at Strategy

I know this will come as a shocker to many, especially those inside Microsoft, but it’s true.  Once Microsoft’s essential monopolies were cemented, their strategy consisted 100% of holding onto them and milking them for every last penny they could.  You could call that strategy, but it isn’t competitive strategy, and that’s where Microsoft have been losing their shirts.

When you’ve been so successful for so long with such strong monopolies, it isn’t surprising that strategy becomes atrophied.

When you’ve gotten there by copying and commoditizing the Other Guy’s Ideas, who will deliver the next great Strategic Ideas that change the terrain meaningfully to Microsoft’s advantage?

Strategy is what you do to make winning easier.  When you have a very hard time admitting you’re losing badly and you think you have all the time in the world to fix it with overwhelming force, why bother with Strategy?

Perhaps Nadella is a strategically subtle Guy, but he hasn’t shown that side yet.  Sure, there are some decent tactics at play, but aren’t they more finally accepting the Other Guy’s Playbook than genuinely inventing any new plays yourself?

Problem Number 4:  Microsoft is Clueless About Creating Insanely Great Products

This has been clear for a long time.  As they commoditize Other People’s Ideas, the results have never been quite as good.  It’s like there’s a little extra noise each time you copy a tape.  By that 3rd generation where Microsoft supposedly gets it right, there’s quite a lot of noise.

The blame here goes squarely with Microsoft’s Product Management Culture.  There has been a misconception about Product Management for a long time in High Tech.  Many see them as the ones who write the stone tablets that are product vision and hand them to engineers who then laboriously transcribe those visionary ideas into products.  While a tiny percentage of Product Managers may be good at that, the vast majority are not, though their organizations give them that power for a variety of historical and political reasons.

Here’s the thing:

Product Managers are the only people in the organization whose sole job is to listen to the customer and help inform product direction of that feedback.

That’s it, that’s all, it’s a full time job, full stop.  They pass those customer insights on to whomever really does do the Product Vision.

The other shoe that drops is implementing laundry lists of literal customer requests does not a product vision make. Instead it creates the cluttered messes that are what we hate about Microsoft software today.  Synthesizing all of those requests to understand the real underlying problem customers want to solve may inform at least a portion of the vision.  But most of the real visionaries take this input as just a set of anecdotes.  They derive a vision far larger than the input because innovation cannot be deduced it can only be imagined and concieved.  The results may even be at odds with the customer input.  Most game changers are.  Characters like Steve Jobs and even Henry Ford (if I’d asked customers what they wanted they’d have said a better horse, not a car) worked that way.

By this stage, Microsoft software usability is hugely tarnished to the point of embarrassment.  No fiddling around with the current Product Management-based culture will fix it.  Real Product Vision is a fairly dictatorial process.  Until Microsoft finds and empowers some real visionaries, little will change.

Whither Thou Goest, Oh Microsoft?

Four tough problems that the current and past leadership and in fact the very culture at Microsoft are not well equipped to deal with.  Yet there are some mitigating factors.

Hardware and the Steady March of Moore’s Law Will Help to Buy Microsoft Time

I recently acquired a Microsoft Surface Pro 3.  It’s a fantastic piece of hardware–every bit the equal of Apple’s iPad or Macbook hardware.  The software is flawed, but relatively fixable.  When I use it, I can’t help but wonder if it were a little bit cheaper and the usability flaws were fixed, why would I care about iPads or Android tablets?

Those older devices have the compromises that were needed to make them work given the hardware limitations of their day. As it becomes possible to offer anything that could run on a PC in that form factor, such devices seem increasingly anachronistic.  This is a wide open opportunity for Microsoft to re-emerge if they can fix the usability problems of Windows 8.

Unfortunately, I don’t see Windows 10 doing that, but that’s a subject for another article.

Microsoft’s Chief Rivals are Not What They Used to Be

Apple and Google may be bigger than ever before, but their inevitability is much more in question than at various times in the past.

Apple is sorely missing Steve Jobs and has had a raft of problems lately ranging from privacy breaches to the painful task of propping up a stock price that already touches the sky.  In may ways Tim Cook could turn out to be Apple’s version of Steve Ballmer.  He’s certainly no Steve Jobs, and the question will be whether he can create a sufficiently Jobsian substitute in the already extant Apple Culture to keep the pace of innovation on.  The longer they keep up with ho-hums like the iPhone 6 or their wrist watch (battery life of one day and most of my friends have completely stopped wearing wrist watches) the more the world will begin to wonder.

Every day brings Google closer to being unable to sustain the growth needed for its multiples on its core search advertising business.  Every day customers are educated more fully that they are really not customers–in an ad-driven business model they are the inventory, and they’re not treated nearly as well as customers expect to be.  Google is so far another Microsoft milking its monopolies while it thrashes around wildly looking for new revenue sources that are big enough and profitable enough to matter.  Most of their acquisitions die with a whimper.

Microsoft Have a Monstrous Huge War Chest

The acqusition of Minecraft and Nokia makes that clear.  If Microsoft can find suitably strategic targets of opportunity, they certainly have the cash to acquire them.  The trick is in finding the right targets.  All too often this becomes an excercise in tying two stones together in hopes they float better than one.  Most of these acquisitions wind up net destroyers of capital.

Nadella has the Honeymoon Period’s Willing Suspension of Disbelief

He has time, perhaps two more years, to start making meaningful progress out of the quagmire.

Gates is no dummy either.  In fact he is probably the smartest person I’ve ever met.  Vanity Fair got it wrong when they said he’s a big picture guy.  I spent an afternoon debating deep product architecture with him as he considered acquiring my company and at least at that time he had deeper product knowledge than any CEO I’d ever met.  Unfortunately, he has little knowledge that’s relevant to the 4 big problems I’ve outlined.  But, he has always been the sort to throw himself deeply at problems, even intractable problems of the third world as the Vanity Fair piece suggests.

The trick for both of these gentlemen is focusing on the right problems to solve.  If they can, they’re likely to make a difference.  If they can’t, there will be change visible but it will be for naught.

What odds do you give them and what are the right problems for them to focus on?

I’m a day late, it was 20 years ago yesterday that Dr Dobbs published James Coplien’s article on how my Quattro Pro team was building software at Borland.  Jim sent me a very nice note of reminder on it:

This is a good occasion for me to tell that story of how (with Jim’s article!) I helped start the whole Agile/Scrum thing going.

The article came about because Coplien was studying software development productivity while he was with Bell Labs.  He was interviewing various groups, measuring their relative productivity, and trying to figure out what the most productive teams were doing differently.  At the time, Borland was very much in the throes of launching a slew of products that were brand new code bases for the then very new Windows platform.  I agreed that it’d be fine for him to come in and study our team’s efforts.

I didn’t know an awful lot about how other companies were developing software, heck I didn’t know too much about how Borland was doing it either except that our team seemed to be smaller than a lot of the other ones out there (including many Borland teams) and that we seemed to be more nimble (avoiding the use of that loaded word “agile”).

I was very young back then, having started my first company straight out of grad school at Rice University.  I never did get that PhD in Computer Science because instead of writing a thesis, I decided to write a business plan instead.  One thing I will say for Rice is that it was a great education in CS.  It was also the genesis of my ideas about how to build software.  One of the most interesting things that went on there was they brought in guest lecturers who gave us some impression of what was happening elsewhere in the Computer Science world at large.

I vividly remember the first “famous” software developer I met as a guest lecturer.  It was Stu Feldman from Bell Labs who had invented a program called “make”.  We all used it constantly to discover which files had been changed and speed up the compilation process so that only those files had to be recompiled and they were recompiled in the right order.  This is so basic few even talk about it anymore, but back then it was worth noticing.

What was interesting about Stu’s talk was that what he had to say about “make” was a side I had never even considered.  It was obvious to me how it worked when I saw it first, but Stu was there to talk about programmer productivity moreso than “make,” and what he had to say really caught my attention.

Programmer Productivity was a pet of mine at the time, and I had visions of going forth in the world to create the world’s greatest programming tools–tools that would radically increase every developer’s productivity.  My first startup actually built some tools like that, but that’s a story for another post.  Suffice to say that when Feldman went down that path, he had my undivided attention, because he said “make” had come about because he was tilting at the same windmills I wanted so badly to attack.

Feldman boiled the central problem in productivity down to very simple terms.  Essentially what he said was that we didn’t know how to get very many people successfully working together on a project.  After maybe 10 or 12 developers, adding more generally degraded the group’s overall productivity more than the new developer’s additional productivity could help. The central problem, according to Feldman, was communication.  “We just don’t know how to get more than 10 or 12 communicating together effectively nor how to keep them all on top of what’s going on so they could do their jobs well.”

Of course I immediately went forth after that seminar and started to soak up any wisdom I could about these issues.  Brooks Mythical Man Month (you can’t use 9 women to make a baby in a month) was also a huge influence.  In the course of reading such things, it became clear to me that software tools were not enough.  What we needed were processes and cultural changes to manage those communication problems.  This realization led me to some very basic conclusions that have informed the culture and methodologies I have used for software development ever since.  They were alive and well when Coplien analyzed the Quattro Pro team.  In fact, they were 4th generation by the time James got to see us in action.

I haven’t changed these things much.  I go through an Agile or Scrum book every so often.  They make sense, but I don’t know that they’ve influenced me to change much.

Here are the fundamental tenets I follow from these experiences:

1.  Keep teams to 10’ish or smaller in size.  I’ve never really tried to push this envelope much.  In fact, not too long after Coplien’s work came out, I wound up in charge of all Engineering at Borland and one of the things I did was to insist on all teams fitting within this parameter.  Specifically, we cut back to 10 developers, 10 QA, and 3 writers on every project.  That included consultants and part-timers.  It was met with a high degree of skepticism and emotion as you would imagine, but it worked.  We cut costs and kept all the projects within the schedules that had been set before we scaled back.  The exception to the rule is projects where you can create solid API firewalls between components and put 10 developers on either side of the firewall.  Classic for Enterprise Software projects.

2.  If you can only have 10 on the team, they’d better be the very best that you can find.  Sure seems obvious to me, but I am continually surprised at how seldom it is followed for all the wrong reasons.  Get the best you can find means you’d better be prepared to do a lot of things:

–  Make engineering a first class part of the company.  You’ll often hear me saying, “They’re called Software companies, not Sales, Marketing, or Finance companies.”  If developers are second class citizens, they’ll smell it a mile away and won’t come near.

–  Pay what it takes.  Yeah, I know, every HR group on the planet will wave a bunch of studies saying compensation is not a motivator.  They’ll tell you, “We like to pay at the 70th percentile,” if you’re lucky and it’ll be 50th if you’re not.  Most studies of most things describe very eloquently a regression to the mean.  If you’re happy being on the mean, do what they have to say.  If not, ask yourself what you’re going to do differently.  I had the whole nth percentile pay conversation with probably my favorite PR professional in the industry.  This individual is probably also the most famous for various reasons.  Eventually I had to go to the CEO of the company to make the point about why we had to pay what we had to pay and after that, I believe this individual added it to her bag of tricks.  The bottom line is that the developer may not care about any specific bonus.  But they know they have the talent and they know when they’re being paid less when others of similar talent.  That’s a very bad thing to let happen, trust me.

–  Give them a high performance environment to work in.  Today, cubicles and often desks packed as tightly as possible together are being pushed as the ultimately productivity tools.  That’s horse hockey.  Writing software requires laser-like focus and concentration.  I am all about communication, that’s how I came up with all this, but communication needs to be engineered into the process and not slapped on by osmosis.  Maximize the distractions for these kind of people and you will minimize their productivity.  I can’t tell you how many places I’ve worked that just don’t get this.  Typically, you have to cheat it into the system with a liberal work-at-home policy.

–  Parallel Career Tracks for Pure Techies and Management.  This is another one that non-developers don’t get.  The worst days on the job for someone like me are when one of their very best individual contributors asks for a one on one, comes in all tense, and announces they’re ready to be made a manager.  I always start that discussion out by asking them why they’re attracted to the job.  If I get any variation on the flavor of, “I want to make the decisions because I have the most talent and will make the best decisions,” that individual gets counseled out of being a manager.  If we reach a point where they insist or they’re leaving, well, I tell them I will miss them.  Better to lose a great architect that turn them into a lousy manager who will no doubt piss of their team and then you lose a lot more.  As I said, those are among the worst days in my career when those things come up.

3.  Great teams build great software relatively cheaply.  Nothing is more expensive to a company than having a lousy team build lousy software.  Where am I going with this?  Forget outsourcing, offshoring, consultants, and all the rest of the silly things companies do to try to save a dime here or there on software development.  Lots of very smart people argue with me on this one constantly, but it’s true.  Look, if you’re hiring all the uber talented 10 person teams you can lay hands on and going offshore is just a way to hire even more (Google, you know who you are), it’s fine.  But if you can build anything with 10 or fewer great engineers, how much savings potential is there really in going offshore versus how much risk?  Which really awesome products in this world were built entirely offshore or outsourced.  And if communication is the biggest challenge affecting developer productivity, why would you put one team half a world away, make sure there were tons of cultural disconnects, make sure there were time zone challenges, and then just to be double darned sure you interfered with communication as much as possible make them talk over the two tin cans and a string called Skype to save a few more nickels?

4.  With only 10 on the team, they can know everything that’s going on.  OK, now we’re onto communication principles.  With only 10, they can all sit in a room together and know everything that’s going on.  Why not have them do that, every single day?  They’ll help critique each other’s work.  They’ll get fired up and empowered.  They’ll know things that the others don’t and share them.  They’ll all be on the same page, for goodness sake.  Wait.  Oh my, I hear the complaints and jeers.

Meetings are such a time sync.

Yes they are if you can’t manage one effectively.  What, did you think that you Mr Manager, were in that meeting solely so that  your subordinates could make you more efficient?  Hell no.  You’re in that meeting to make your team more efficient.  Use an agenda, keep the meeting short, make sure it starts and ends on time, change up the format to make sure people pay attention, assign everyone homework for the meeting so it doesn’t go stream of consciousness, make everyone present something, and when all else fails, make it fun.  Build the camaraderie.

I’m an extroverted management by walking around kind of guy.  Having meetings like this every morning was my attempt at letting everyone share the joys of that.  It was a crucial part of our productivity, and today it is a cornerstone of Agile/Scrum where it is called a “Standing” meeting or a “Stand Up” meeting.  Apparently some folks took it a bit literally and started doing the meeting without chairs.  That’s fine, I think I’ll keep the chairs in my meetings, but they’re short enough that not having chairs shouldn’t be a problem.  I used to tell people to get them to the meeting on time that there’d be two fewer chairs than attendees, but that was just my lame joke and I don’t recall actually every doing that.

5.  If communication is the challenge, focus the communication, make it count, and minimize unnecessary communication that just sucks up bandwidth.  The best way to do that is laser-like focus that fiercely attacks each challenge and finishes it before moving on to the next.  Thus was born the Agile Backlog on my teams.

I’m a compulsive list maker.  I always thought of them as ToDos, I made them long life documents, and I constantly evaluated priorities, deferring as much as possible until later.  Imagine my surprise the first time someone asked to see my “Agile Backlog” and I had no idea what they were talking about.  After a laborious explanation, I trotted out the “ToDo” for that project and they were invariably overjoyed.  Nothing like fancy terminology to elevate an obvious idea to sainthood, lol.

My role in the meetings was to present the near-term portion of my Todo, um, I mean the Agile Backlog, to the team.  Keep them focused at 2 week intervals was and is my mantra.  Keep dragging the highest risk most poorly understood items to the front of the Backlog so they get hammered down and solved.  That latter I got from a book on military strategies and was credited to Rommel, the Dessert Fox, who always believed on focusing his guns on his most dangerous adversary on the battlefield, moving to the next most dangerous, and so on.

6.  Make it clear with pictures.  UI Mock ups and Storyboards beat pages of narrative time and time again.  People hate PowerPoint, but that’s usually because they didn’t consider the alternative of reading a 70 page document that accomplishes the same purpose.  I am a big believer in building the UI first to this day, so we can argue usability and understand what the underlying engines will be called on to do right from the start of a project.

7.  Code Reviews.  I always made my developers present their major subsystems twice.  First was an architectural review before much code had been written.  Here’s the problem we’re trying to solve, here’s how we’ll solve it, here there be dragons, here we’re not so worried.  This was done in the morning meetings and everyone chimed in with thoughts. Everyone got to hear the underlying assumptions and could squawk if they saw a bad one.  The second meeting was a demo meeting when whatever it was got to “Beta” quality and a “Here’s what worked and what didn’t” if there was no demo.  The what worked and what didn’t often wound up being a dive into the code.

8.  Interactive Middle-Out Programming.  That curious phrase is one I had way back in my distant past.  I was greatly enamored and possibly warped by the first computer language I ever learned:  LISP.  That phrase referred to building up the “bones” or what I called the scaffolding as much as possible before adding the meat.  Don’t insist that everything be finished before you connect it all up.  Connect it up with dummy responses at first and then build out the most critical and highly traffic portions next.  Fill in the details after that.  Most of all, keep something working every single build.  This was the precursor to the Continous Release mindset that we see today.  It’s the beginnings of Minimum Viable Products.

I always presented roadmaps to my management and to customers.  My goal in doing so was twofold.  First, I wanted them to get used to the idea that releases are small potatoes.  Don’t get hung up on what’s in a release, worry about the longer term vision.  Most customers are extremely understanding of that and much more willing to take a lesser product now if they’re sure you’ll eventually get where they need you to be.  Second, I always asked a lot of prioritization questions in those meetings and took every opportunity to defer things that didn’t seem high priority to later releases.  We did this right from my very first startup, so I guess we were early to the MVP bandwagon.

9.  Embrace Change.  Software is the most malleable medium in the engineering world, yet it can be brittle when timeframes are too short.  What you can’t do is ignore the inevitability of change.  We learn new things every day that can result in change.  We can fear change, or we can embrace it as opportunity.  So many aspects of the methodology I’m describing help you to embrace change when you need to:

–  Keeping the Backlog short-term focused means you can churn the heck out of the part the team hasn’t visited yet with impunity.  Re-prioritize.  Add.  Delete.  Most of all, Learn and React.

–  Middle Out Programming surfaces weakness in the interconnecting structure, the architecture, sooner.  So does UI prototyping.  Ignore the details that are not costly to change and focus on validating what is.

–  Small Teams of Uber Developers are inherently more able to change.

10.  Communicate Face to Face.  Make any documents as temporary as face to face communications.  In fact, make them only as needed to facilitate the face to face.  The software is the only long-term document to worry about.

11.  Lead, Don’t Manage.  Sell, Don’t Tell.  Everyone has to be sold.  Your team, the business side, and the customers.  Don’t hide out and expect the final product to be so dazzling you won’t have to sell.  Don’t hide behind your title secure that your people have to do what you tell them.  As soon as you get the idea, go to all your sounding boards.  As it resonates, grow that audience rapidly.  Make each meeting a learning experience on how to sell the next audience even better.  When people are sold, they become passionate.  Nothing is more valuable to the team than passionate talent.

12.  Don’t Prematurely Optimize, But Manage Technical Debt Consciously.  Middle out programming encourages the avoidance of premature optimization.  Always code it up as quickly as you know how.  But know as best you can where you think changes will have to be made.  And in so knowing, know how hard those changes will be.  If the write bones are there, the changes are confined inside particular internal organs.  If we have to change all the bones, every organ will be impacted. You don’t want Technical Debt in your bones because it becomes pervasive in a hurry.  A little technical debt in the organs is fine and can be dealt with quickly when the need is proven.

13.  Do Post Mortems and then Experiment.  After every release, we’d do a post mortem on our productivity.  What worked, what didn’t, what were the problems.  Then we’d ask for ideas on how to change.  We’d pick one or two of those and implement them on the next project.  Then, at that project’s post mortem, we would evaluate their efficacy and decide whether to continue the practice or not.

14.  Be a Software Factory, Not a Release Workshop.  I like this one to be the capstone of the principles I’ve used to guide my teams over the years.  You want everyone on the team as well as the rest of the company to think of the team not in terms of each release, but in terms of their efficacy as a Software Factory.  No competitive war is won with a single release.  No market is dominated by a single release.  Rather, it is the ability of the team to be a better Software Factory than any they compete with that wins the day.  If they can turn the release crank faster, if they can anticipate what customers want better, if they can deliver higher quality, and if they can do some combination of that more cheaply than the competition, they’re doing everything that can be expected of a Software Development Team to win the war.

Many types of investment in Software Development have to be understood in these terms because they can never be justified for a single release.  If your CEO insists on being exclusively release focused, he is going to have you mostly chasing the puck instead of skating to where the puck will be.

Today’s Agile:  Lean Manufacturing

I’ve followed those 14 tenets almost from my start.  They were certainly completely baked into my software development efforts by the Quattro Pro days, and I haven’t found much need to add to them since.

I can’t decide whether it’s ironic or inevitable, but today I am doing many of the same things I had focused on for developers for the CNC Manufacturing world.  Coplien and Scrum Founder Jeff Sutherland comment that Scrum was inspired by the Toyota Production System.

I knew nothing of Toyota when I created my methodologies (and have carried on without spending too much time on Agile or Scrum either).  I did what made sense to me based on the influences I’d had as I’ve explained.  But my bootstrapped company, CNCCookbook, is intimately involved with the CNC (Computer-Controlled Machine Tools, 3D Printers, and the like) Manufacturing World, so it was probably inevitable that I would eventually write a series of articles on Lean Manufacturing.

The series is not finished yet, but all the key concepts are there.  I can absolutely see similarities between Agile/Scrum and Lean Manufacturing, but with that said, I find them more cousins than siblings.  The Toyota work was done quite some time ago.  It’s lessons are still quite relevant to manufacturing, but I believe that what we (I) have learned about Agile methodologies are relevant to manufacturing.  CNCCookbook is currently developing a new product called G-Wizard ShopFloor that will bring that to light in a modern collaborative environment that emphasizes these hybrid methods.

The first “grainy photos” from ShopFloor are starting to come into focus, the UI prototype is done, we’re starting to show it to a few friendlies and the interactive middle out programming process is fully underway.  I’m having a lot of fun with it and can’t wait to see if the manufacturing world can benefit as much as software development has from these techniques.

I’m really having fun with it!

The other thing you might be interested in is my course on how to Work Smarter and Get Things Done.  It’s over on my Entrepreneurship site, BobWarfield.com, and it teaches how to use Agile/Scrum along with some custom software I wrote to radically boost your individual productivity.