Management Bits and Tips

I own a few books about bullshit and reading them is great fun. The first one is about bullshit in economics, politics, medicine, marketing, sales, and many other areas of human activity. I read it completely two years ago and highly recommend:

The Dictionary of Bullshit

The second book is very short, easy to carry around and looks like Tractatus Bullshito-Philosophicus:

On Bullshit

The last two books I bought recently and the first of them is the dictionary that seems to be very funny too:

The Dictionary of Corporate Bullshit: An A to Z Lexicon of Empty, Enraging, and Just Plain Stupid Office Talk

The other one seems to be a compilation of various philosophical works with guaranteed results:

Bullshit and Philosophy (Popular Culture and Philosophy)

- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -

Follow-up and Follow-through are essential skills of every manager (bit). In the absence of specialized software use your existing e-mail system to tag important e-mail messages with keywords (tip). 

For example, when I send important analysis results and I want to look at them in retrospect after a couple of months for postmortem analysis I type the following tag at the end of my e-mail message:

[dmitry vostokov: revisit later]

After some time I just do a simple search in my inboxes to get all these tagged messages.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -

Just created a permanent page where you can click on individual bits. Hope you find it useful

http://www.managementbits.com/management-bits-and-tips/

- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -

Metaphorical mapping from False Positive Dump pattern brings us to False Project Failure pattern that usually happens when assessing the current project status leads to overestimating its potential failure and stakeholders think that actual failure has already happened. Let me bring an example from my own software engineering experience. One of software developers was assigned a project to develop a wizard-like installation system tightly integrated with voice recognition. Due to some reasons I don’t want to discuss here the system wasn’t developed and we faced demonstration of it in front of VP on the next day when we learnt about the nonexistence of even the prototype version. However that was only potential failure not turned to actual because we managed to create a working prototype overnight by typing screen dialogs in MS Word, print screening them to bitmap files, drawing Next and Prev buttons in MS Paint and crafting a small GUI program that sequentially displayed these pictures based on whether mouse clicks were in the region of painted buttons. The prototype was working like the clock and VP was so impressed that he didn’t even have questions to ask. The project was abandoned in another 6 months but this is another story and a different pattern. 

- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -

History and current affairs books are full with political case studies (bit). Read history books to get balanced view of politics and better understand corporations, internal and external forces that shape them and move people in, up, and out (tip).

I love history since childhood. I resumed reading history books after very long period of being a software engineer and in the future posts I’m going to point to some books that I recently read or plan to read. One of them is

The Naked Capitalist

Reading this book prompted me to buy another one that I’m reading now:

Tragedy & Hope: A History of the World in Our Time

- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -

Reflecting on my old software engineering days I remember working for one of the biggest software factories in Russia and noticing IE windows on workstations when I was passing by. Then working for one of the biggest software factories in telecommunications domain I noticed the same screens whenever I entered engineering offices. People there obviously had plenty of time for browsing, reading and typing (not in some programming language of course). At that time I started calling them Process Parasites and their relationship to a team and an organization as Process Parasitism which (paraphrasing Wikipedia definition) is: 

a type of symbiotic relationship between an employee and an organization in which one, the process parasite, benefits from a prolonged, close association with the processes in the organization.  

What kind of benefits a process parasite gains? Obviously one benefit is time: free time to do whatever a parasite wants or needs but irrelevant to business goals. This especially happens when there are process inefficiencies and underplanning of resources.

One manager reading this post noticed the curious similarity between the word “website” and the word “parasite“.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -

This blog has got new experimental “design” based on default Wordpress theme and custom header that reflects my current understanding of what management bits really mean.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -

Isn’t it that management is about creating organization from mess (chaos)? In another words, good managers thrive on mess. Isn’t it that management is about preventing mess to appear from organization? In another words, management is about complete annihilation of mess. This is what I thought until today when in a local book store I found this interesting book, was intrigued by its title and bought it:

A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder–How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place (paperback)

Hardcover edition has thirty 4 and 5 star reviews on Amazon and only three reviews are 3 stars so my intuition says the book should be really good:

A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder–How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place (hardcover)

I haven’t yet started reading it but I believe from evolutionary perspective mess provides sources of randomization necessary for survival and fitness of organization. If we are self-organizing ourselves then how do we know that we have chosen the best structure and strategy? If we believe we are right aren’t we ultimately fooled by randomness?    

- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -