Frederick
the Great [PDF]: “Soldiers should fear their officers more
than all the dangers to which they are exposed.... Good will can never induce
the common soldier to stand up to such dangers; he will only do so through
fear.”
The Command and Control form of management is based on military management.
Primarily, the idea is that people do what you tell them to do, and if they
don’t, you yell at them until they do, and if they still don’t, you throw them
in the brig for a while, and if that doesn’t teach them, you put them in charge
of peeling onions on a submarine, sharing two cubit feet of personal space with
a lad from a farm who really never quite learned about brushing his teeth.
There are a million great techniques you can use. Rent the movies
Biloxi Blues and
An Officer and a Gentleman
for some ideas.
Some managers use this technique because they actually learned it in the
military. Others grew up in authoritarian households or countries and think it’s
a natural way to gain compliance. Others just don’t know any better. Hey, it
works for the military, it should work for an internet startup!
There are, it turns out, three drawbacks with this method in a high tech
team.
First of all, people don’t really like it very much, least of all
smarty-pants software developers, who are, actually, pretty smart and are used
to thinking they know more than everyone else, for perfectly good reasons,
because it happens to be true, and so it really, really bothers them when
they’re commanded to do something “because.” But that’s not really a good
enough reason to discard this method… we’re trying to be rational here. High
tech teams have many goals but making everyone happy is rarely goal number one.
A more practical drawback with Command and Control is that management
literally does not have enough time to micromanage at this level, because there
simply aren’t enough managers. In the military, it’s possible to give an order
simultaneously to a large team of people because it’s common that everyone is
doing the same thing. “Clean your guns!” you can say, to a squad of 28, and
then go take a brief nap and have a cool iced tea on the Officer’s Club
veranda. In software development teams everybody is working on something else,
so attempts to micromanage turn into hit and run micromanagement. That’s
where you micromanage one developer in a spurt of activity and then suddenly
disappear from that developer’s life for a couple of weeks while you run around
micromanaging other developers. The problem with hit and run micromanagement is
that you don’t stick around long enough to see why your decisions are not
working or to correct course. Effectively, all you accomplish is to knock your
poor programmers off the train track every once in a while, so they spend the
next week finding all their train cars and putting them back on the tracks and
lining everything up again, a little bit battered from the experience.
The third drawback is that in a high tech company the individual
contributors always have more information than the “leaders,” so they are
really in the best position to make decisions. When the boss wanders into an office
where two developers have been arguing for two hours about the best way to
compress an image, the person with the least information is the boss, so
that’s the last person you’d want making a technical decision. I
remember when Mike Maples was my great grand-boss, in charge of Microsoft Applications,
he was adamant about refusing to take sides on technical issues. Eventually
people learned that they shouldn’t come to him to adjudicate. This forced
people to debate the issue on the merits and issues were always resolved in
favor of the person who was better at arguing, er, I
mean, issues were always resolved in the best possible way.
If Command and Control is such a bad way to run a team, why does the
military use it?
This was explained to me in NCO school. I was in the Israeli paratroopers in
1986. Probably the worst paratrooper they ever had, now that I think back.
There are several standing orders for soldiers. Number one: if you are in a
mine field, freeze. Makes sense, right? It was drilled into you repeatedly
during basic training. Every once in a while the instructor would shout out
“Mine!” and everybody had to freeze just so you would get in the habit.
Standing order number two: when attacked, run towards your attackers
while shooting. The shooting makes them take cover so they can’t fire at
you. Running towards them causes you to get closer to them, which makes it
easier to aim at them, which makes it easier to kill them. This standing order
makes a lot of sense, too.
OK, now for the Interview Question. What do you do if you’re in a minefield,
and people start shooting at you?
This is not such a hypothetical situation; it’s a really annoying way to get caught in an ambush.
The correct answer, it turns out, is that you ignore the minefield, and run
towards the attackers while shooting.
The rationale behind this is that if you freeze, they’ll pick you off one at
a time until you’re all dead, but if you charge, only some of you will die by
running over mines, so for the greater good, that’s what you have to do.
The trouble is that no rational soldier would charge under such
circumstances. Each individual soldier has an enormous incentive to cheat:
freeze in place and let the other, more macho soldiers do the charging. It’s
sort of like a Prisoners’ Dilemma.
In life or death situations, the military needs to make sure that they can
shout orders and soldiers will obey them even if the orders are suicidal. That
means soldiers need to be programmed to be obedient in a way which is not
really all that important for, say, a software company.
In other words, the military uses Command and Control because it’s the only
way to get 18 year olds to charge through a minefield, not because they think
it’s the best management method for every situation.
In particular, in software development teams where good developers can work
anywhere they want, playing soldier is going to get pretty tedious and
you’re not really going to keep anyone on your team.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/08/08.html
No hay comentarios.:
Publicar un comentario