Slack
Slack (Tom DeMarco)
When you find yourself responding the same way regardless of the stimulus, you're no longer acting in an entirely rational way.
- Ever-increasing busyness is not good for individuals, and they know it. The main thesis of the book is that its not good for the companies they work for either. It makes them unable to change.
- Companies have been optimized for efficiency, however whats needed now is agility. The prescription for increased agility is the subject of this book.
The more efficient you get the harder it is to change.
- Reduced stress and the reintroduction of an essential bit of slack is the best recipe for:
- Increased organizational agility
- Better retention of key personnel
- Improved ability to invest in the future
- A capacity for sensible risk taking instead of risk avoidance
- Slack is the degree of freedom required to affect change.
Paradox of managing knowledge workers: In order to keep control you have to give it up. You have to use your authority sparingly that no one notices that its being used. Create a real sense that control is not completely centralized in your hands, but spread generously over the whole of the organization. Slack that you cut knowledge workers is control slack.
Slack is the way you invest in change. It represents operational capacity sacrificed in the interests of long-term health.
- The present value of the figure revenue is almost always much greater than the cost this year – This is why you invest in R&D! A penny saved from any kind of investment is never an penny earned.
- People under time pressure dont think faster.
- Project managers are taught from their earliest years that striving toward even the most impossible schedule can do no harm. The notion that impossible schedules dont damage projects is ludicrous. There is such a thing as a bad schedules. one that sets a date that is subsequently missed. A plan that takes no account of realities is not just useless but dangerous.
Putting yourself in as your own utility infielder is a clear sign of bad management.
Healthy companies know that they have to allow people to fail without assessing blame. They have to do that or else no one will take on anything that is not a sure bet.
Paradox of automation: When new automation is in place there is less total work to be done by the human, but what work is left is harder. Automation makes work harder not easier.
- There is little else in the work experience with so much capacity to motivate than the desire not to injure the person above you that entrusted you. Processes standardization from on high is dis-empowerment.
- Efficiency vs Effectiveness: Efficient when you do something with minimum waste. Effective when your doing the right something. Its possible to be one without the other.
The difference between strategic thinking and drift is a matter of whether the key choices are made mindfully or mindlessly. Tactics are a lot easier than strategy. Tactics can be handled in isolation.
- Directing an entire organization is hard. Seeming to direct it is easy. All you have to do is note which way the drift is moving and instruct the organization to go that way.
Lack of power is a great excuse for failure, but sufficient power is never a necessary condition of leadership. There is never sufficient power. In fact, it is success in the absence of sufficient power that defines leadership.
Leadership is not restricted to acting only downward along the lines of organizational authority. The bread-and-butter acts of leadership that make companies healthy involve people leading their bosses, leading their peers, leading those in peer organizations, negotiating, and influencing all without ever being granted the official power to do what they are doing. Its enrolling someone who is distinctly outside the scope of your official power base that constitutes real leadership.
You acquire trust by giving trust.
- We tend to resist learning things that really matter. As soon as its apparent that a new approach is superior to what they have been doing, they feel uneasy.
- All internal competition is destructive.
- Risk management is planning for failure.