Slashdot Mirror
Managing for Creativity
theodp writes "After seeing some of the ideas management comes up with as a result of reading the Harvard Business Review, you may be tempted to hide their copies. But make sure they see this month's Managing for Creativity by Dr. Jim Goodnight, the still code-cranking CEO of SAS, the world's largest privately held software company." From the article: "Many academics and businesses have made inroads into this field. Management guru Peter Drucker identified the role of knowledge workers and, long before the dot-com era, warned of the perils of trying to "bribe" them with stock options and other crude financial incentives. This view is supported by the research of Harvard Business School's Teresa Amabile and Yale University's Robert Sternberg, which shows that creative people are motivated from within and respond much better to intrinsic rewards than to extrinsic ones."
Then along came "global resourcing" and the concept of "bribing" knowledge workers at all became unnecessary and said knowledge workers learned to be grateful that they still had a position at all.
Seriously, in a world where any and every position has, is or will eventually be outsourced, the entire concept of "bribing" an employee is anachronistic. Maybe if you have the name recognition of a Shawn Fanning and someone wants your name to bootstrap their venture capital process, but not if you're Joe-Average-Buying-Four-Dollar-Milk guy.
Today's "crude financial incentive" is "not being downsized".
And to continue harping on the ridiculousness of such an article in an outsourcing world, I have to ask - when you're outsourcing for one tenth the salary, do you really expect any of the outsourced people you're managing to be "creative"? I've worked with a number of them and however they may be in their personal life, when it comes to the job they're paid for, they are anything BUT creative.
This guy is one of those idealistic dreamers who has the misguided notion that you can employee people, treat them well, encourage them to be creative and non-comformist and original and not ditch them for the lowest bidder and somehow run a successful company in the long term. Learn a thing or two from today's top public-CEOs and start laying people off. Be a man! Send out some reduction notices! Cut some salaries! Freeze hiring and raises across the board! Freeze available training and education! Put the fear of outsourcing into your subordinates or you're going to end up on the garbage heap. In fact, it is downright un-patriotic to treat his employees like he is doing and promote those communist labor-friendly, creativity-inspiring warm-fuzzy propaganda ideas.
Completely off topic - what a name...Jim Goodnight! I can see the Abbot and Costello sketch for it, now...
Ok, you are my manager. Here's where you can start...
1. Judge me by my work, not be how many hours I put in. You wrote the job description - if I can do the work you need in X hours, why should I hang around my cubicle for X+n hours, especially when I use 'extra' time to try and figure out better ways to do our job, which you ignore?
2. Substance trumps form. This applies to not only work, but policy enforcement. Telling me that we use XX product, and because XX cost $YY and took KK consultants ZZ years to implement, it can't suck simply tells me the management team didn't know what kind of pit they were digging. My advice, to get out of the hole - stop digging first!
3. I'll dress the way you want me to and conduct myself by your standards of 'professionalism', as long as you don't treat me like a three-year-old until I give you a reason. Then, just fire me - don't fsck with me.
4. Don't fire people for exchanging their own information - i.e., if we want to talk about salary at lunch, that is our business, period, especially if we aren't on company property.
5. Recognize the utter stupidity of office politics, and no, that jerk from Finance will not become less of a jerk if I learn to golf so I can make nice-nice with him. In fact, it will get you sued and me fired when I put a five-iron through his thorax.
6. Keep the HR group away from me. I do NOT WANT another flier about the suicide hotline, nor do I care about our new marketing effort in Outer Namibia, and as far as Frank Jones, the new VP of Operations, New York, is concerned, re: promotion, well, good for him - I'll never meet him, and I don't think he wants to hear about my promotion either. Nor do I want to know about the class offered for "all professionals" held in San Francisco, that I can't go to because I am either not high up enough, or I don't sell for a living. You expect my work to be relevant to what we do. I expect the same sense of appropriateness and relevance as you do.
7. I realize we have a fiduciary duty to our clients. If you are really worried about my taking advantage of proprietary information, by all means, call the feds. In the meantime, my wife's 401K is NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS - we have no say in how it is invested, the trustee handles that. You should know that, being a large international bank.
8. Before you give me any static about how overworked any/everyone is, and how short on resources we are, how about firing that useless sack of cr@p you complain about so loudly at after-hours work functions? I know he's been here 15 years, and it would make upper management wonder "how did this bag of cr@p last so long?" when you have to justify canning the id10t, but trust me, it will be worth it.
9. Offering benefits and then implementing workplace policies that make it impossible to use them is the same as not offering them, except a whole lot more annoying. ("Gee, we would pay for your night-school classes, but we'll need you to work overtime for the next few months, then as needed after that - you're a professional, so I know you'll get the job done. What? No, we don't pay overtime or comp time, are you kidding?") Odd, how this sudden overtime need hit after I applied for tuition reimbursement...
10. Mandatory fun isn't.
Please note: The above have been aggregated from several different employers, so if you happen to know who I work for, and are a member of management, read #11...
11. Respect my privacy outside of work. Unless I slander you, flaming me at work over what you think I may have implied is unprofessional - yes, that word can apply to management too!
If you are developing software in any capacity, personally I think nothing helps creativity more than a clean code base. When the biggest thing you associate with implementing a new interesting feature is the crap you have to go through to get it interacting with everything else, you aren't very likely to come up with good ideas and act on them often.