Jottings Number 74, Reply A, by James Carrington, Linda Curry, Hudi Podolsky, Margery Auvinen, and Brian Sakai
Date: 7/14/97 9:38 AM
"Everybody Is A Victim"
So says one of my subordinates when discussing any of the currently perceived societal ills.
Another of his favorites: "Management 101 - Always Establish Blame"
These two statements go right to the heart of Jot #74, taking
responsibility for your actions. Too many times, I see individuals around me refusing to accept such responsibility. Witness the woman who sued MacDonalds for the coffee being too hot (she put the cup between her legs while driving). Witness the family that sued the Schwinn bicycle company when their son was killed because he was hit by a car as he was riding his bike after dark (Schwinn OBVIOUSLY should have warned the consumer that riding a bike after dark with no lights or reflectors is unsafe. Well duhhuh).
These two examples point out the one thing wrong with Jot #74. "...admit that we have a problem. Most of us already do that, but we stop there. "
This assertion is false. Most people WILL NOT admit that they have a problem, and when they finally do, it will be someone else's fault.
Susan Smith killed her two young boys because her new boyfriend didn't want a girl friend with kids. But hey, it's not her fault, SHE'S the victim. She was allegedly abused as a child. This point is demonstrated over and over again in news headlines and tv tabloid shows. The statement that lawyers focus on cause instead of prevention is right on the mark, though. Because when the lawyer can prove that his client is the victim, then he can argue that his client should be compensated (read:paid) for his 'inconvenience'. What then, you ask, is the bottom line?
Money.
If the lawyers for the coffee drinker were truly concerned about the health and safety of the public (and their client) then why didn't they sue simply for medical bills plus lost wages and force MacDonalds to lower the temperature of their coffee? Because the more money the client gets, the more money the lawyer gets. Is any amount of money
going to bring back the boy bicyclist? I don't think so. That didn't stop the court from awarding punitive damages. Schwinn started putting tags and stickers on their bikes, warning against night riding. The interesting part is that they were not ordered to do so by the court. They took this step as a precaution against litigation.
It all comes down to money.
Therefore, your statement "decide to get better, as measured by business results, from metrics specified by business managers" should probably be restated "make more money, as measured by business results, from metrics specified by business managers, to the satisfaction of your stockholders"
Unfortunately, I see companies headed down this road. When a CEO tells us that there is a hiring freeze on because of our lack lustre performance of 8% growth instead of the Wall Street expectation of 10%, I have to ask a serious question about corporate responsibility versus profit margin. Wall Street could care less if our products killed people, as long as we could balance out the losses and still meet our revenue goals. (Ford didn't recall the Pinto because they felt that it would be cheaper to pay off the lawsuits than to fix all of those cars so that they would not explode while refueling.) Who are we kidding when we say we can maintain our level of quality and we have six engineers working 60+ hours a week each. Mistakes will be made in this situation. Design flaws that may only manifest themselves once in the hands of the consumer.
So Joe, to answer your questions;
Q. What are the linkages between our key processes and business results? A. Profit Margin (money) Q. What are the trends?
A. Less emphasis on quality, more on profit margin (money)
Q. What are the problems that we are seeing?
A. Not enough profit margin (money)
Q. Are we publicly discussing the problems in clear terms, not Microspeak, without worrying about blame?
A. No. Fixing problems takes time away making money, and blaming someone means you can sue them for money.
Q. Rather than just living with the situations, are we determined to get better?
A. As long as getting better means making more money.
We are living in a society where our children are taught that the wealth of ones bank account means more than the wealth of ones soul. I intend not to make that mistake with my children.
Cynically (and barely solvent),
James Carrington
Ever since I stumbled across your jottings, I have been stimulated by the various essays and responses that are generated. A lot of the themes I've read discuss issues through the eyes/experiences of a learning individual vs. a command/control person. I really like seeing both sides of an issue discussed.
This last jotting on getting better touched a couple of nerves. I am disturbed at the trends to homogenize and assimilate unique individuals/cultures into one human mass. We as a species are doomed to extinction if we do not have tolerance for those pushing the edges of human experiences. Likewise, those pushing the edges of experience should not be expecting the whole human family to share the consequences of their inquiry. Of course we can be delighted when other people are excited by new possibilities, but we can't force feed technology.
Computing technology is here to stay and will have even more profound effects on our society and culture in years to come. Computing professionals MUST recognize their responsibility to make their products as bug free as possible. Especially as computers are advancing into every aspect of our daily life, when people are starting to believe machines more than they believe people, it is critical that the machines behave as they are intended. What is even more critical is teaching critical thinking skills to humans that interface with machines, so that they can sense whether the computed answer is a "real" solution.
Before succumbing to the economic or ego pressure to be first, to get to market, to make the buck or to get the applause, computing professionals should be nurturing their creations as they would children. Don't make excuses for mistakes. Accept consequences and actively resolve to do better the next time. Don't rush to release if the product has not been thoroughly tested and retested by the creator, a development team and some cold customers that don't have a stake in the product success, but could benefit from the product features.
What disturbs me most about the computer revolution is the lack of foresight. Many of those that are fluent in computer hardware/software can make their machines do amazing things that have never been considered before. Most of the computing world is under 50 and lacks certain life maturity that would give them pause before wasting time and/or energy on some of these antics. Alot of computer literate people are very illiterate when it comes to world literature or history. The trend towards instant gratification is nihilistic.
One of the real problems that we are experiencing as a company is the rush to innovate. Innovation is the lifeblood of HP and every other company devoted to scientific products. Product life cycle must be reassessed in more human terms before more products are introduced. When we as business managers or consumers make a commitment to a particular strategy, by default we are not choosing other options. These choices must not be made in a vacuum or without some testing of the possible outcomes. Maybe it's more expensive to develop more than one way to skin the cat, but before we hang a shingle that says we're expert cat skinners we should be so good at it that people wait for our products to imitate rather than developing their own technique.
Humans can only tolerate change in manageable mouthfuls. When we are forced to gobble beyond our ability to chew and digest, we frequently choke to death on the content...unless we spit some of it out.
In my 13 years with HP, I have learned 6 word processing programs, 3 spreadsheet programs and 4 graphics programs. I have worked on HP120's, 150's, Vectras and Unix workstations. I like learning new things, but my enthusiasm is not shared by many of my coworkers. It is an irritant to have to learn a new skill to perform a known function. It is frustrating not to be able to retreive past work products because the hardware upgraded or the software upgraded and the old files are no longer accessible.
Yes, we need trailblazers and new technology constantly evolving. But we also need someone to be thinking about the human aspect of these transitions. Training and development plans must consider individual learning curves and the differences in each business economy. Some HP business are high volume, low mix with low individual unit returns. Some are low volume, high mix with high individual unit returns.
When I think of the way HP has handled distributed computing, I am reminded of the way the Immigration service has been trying to retrain all its field offices to process ever increasing amounts of immigration requests for citizenship and still maintain the quality control that screens out known criminals. Some divisions jump on the bandwagon and play the new tunes as quickly as the sheet music is available. Other divisions play the tunes but with their own queer interpretations of what the music should be. Microspeak might have a place in public relations releases, but we owe to ourselves to speak truth as plainly as we possibly can to our internal community.
Frankly, I think if HP is to maintain our leadership position, we should be speaking truth as much as we are fanatical about reliability. If we want to distinguish ourselves from competitors, we must be different. What works, what is real will be obvious to our customers. The experience of being baited with technology and then switched over to a product that essentially does exactly the same thing as the previous model with no substantial increase in capability leaves a bitter taste in a customer's mouth.
Every time we rush to innovate without a clear strategy or product life cycle plan, we jeopardize our credibility with our customers. If HP is to remain healthy, we need customers to be repeat customers. Customers will always return to the product that has the most solid value and good sales support and service. Customers that are "sold" before they ever open their checkbook are the external salesforce for HP products. They tell their friends and we get new customers. We need to tell it like it is to demonstrate not only our technical competence but our intellectual and emotional maturity.
Thanks for the forum to dump these thoughts to!
Linda Curry HP-Sonoma County
This one has triggered more thoughts than I can attend to right now, so I'll just take the top two.
First, we start teaching children from day 1 in school (and earlier in most homes) that there are right answers and wrong answers and that children who guess right answers are good children and those who guess wrong answers are bad children.
Most of our teachers, having grown up in this system themselves, consistently humiliate children who don't give the answer the teacher thinks is the right one. There is almost never examination of the path the child took to their answer, and soon, many children are no longer even capable of reporting on their path since they have been taught to not do it. Those children grow up to work for Microsoft, or Stanford Hospital, or TWA. Where will they learn to honor and examine thoughtfully a path that led to an undesired or at least unexpected outcome? We insist on not teaching that skill.
In most classrooms, even the classrooms of very dedicated and otherwise thoughtful teachers, as little time as possible is spent understanding error. Most teachers behave as if spending time on errors would be worse than wasteful; it would be confusing and detrimental to learning. They have been taught to act as if the process of learning is fundamentally a process of becoming able to reproduce known, correct outcomes. Learning is re-covering terra cognita.
But welcome to the real world, where most of the terra, certainly all of the terra we map with software, is incognita. The only thing that saves us from our schooling is that humans are natural scientists and our schools aren't effective enough to destroy our spirit of inquiry. They are, however, effective enough to make us ashamed of the need for it.
The school system is doing what we, as a community, ask it to do. The chief metric, the gateway to college and good jobs, is number of right answers per minute. Fortunately, it turns out that the ability to recall or construct a large number of right answers in a given time does not entirely exclude the very different ability to examine failure thoughtfully and productively.
Now, about continuous improvement in a constantly changing world... I think the key here is that we have to focus our improvements on the meta-processes which change at a much slower rate. So maybe we won't use Java long enough to improve our use of it, but we will use language, and we will use the scientific method for a long time. These are things we can improve while we surf the constant rolls of technology.
I've just skimmed the surface. Thanks for raising these interesting issues. Innovation and risk taking are HP values that are especially dear to me (more so after having spent a couple of years in a culture that generally does not value them). But sometimes we act as if we only value innovation and risk that works out the way we wanted it to. It is the very nature of risk that you're going to get lots of failure to learn from. I don't want to fly an airline that values risk taking, but then again, I don't want to work for an airline either.
Hudi Podolsky HP-Palo Alto
Have you read: The Logic of Failure? It talks about people fixing the problem (such as starvation) with well-engineered systems (like crop rotation and well-water systems) only to create worse problems later down the line (like over-population and diminished water resources). The intent and the expertise are genuine and well-planned. The long-term result is disaster.
You'd like the premise of the book : business ecosystems.
Cheers,
Margery Auvinen HP-Roseville
...Joe, nice piece of writing as always...I recall that I was first drawn to you those many years ago because of your writing clarity and...heart...it's clearly been one of the noteworthy aspects of your work...
...in a recent meeting here, in a technical bookclub meeting, we actually discussed the issues around the medical tragedy that you wrote about so elegantly...and we came to similar thoughts about those of us involved ... and we very much are ...in the Information Technology world...we resolved we must get better...not just us QA guys (hate that word) but our company... I left Corvallis with the feeling that they were unwilling to take that first step of admitting they have a problem, in software as well as many other areas.. . sure, they will spend money to make them look like they are aware but not effectively...so, here I am in a small but feisty company, a real old-time HP division in my mind and doing a lot of great stuff (and not so state of art)... and of course who are involved in putting business metrics in place but my manager and yours truly...some things never change for me...ever since I fell in with you process bandits (Chuck, Sally, Grady, et al...)
regards, brian sakai...