Book Review: #Workout by Jurgen Appelo

I'm a bit ashamed of myself. I've owned #Workout: Games, Tools & Practices to Engage People, Improve Work, and Delight Clients by Jurgen Appelo for already half a year and now I finally was able to finish the book. Book is a real gem and I will definitely be using it regularly for my work.

I actually had met Jurgen Appelo years ago in Finnish agile event before he had written any books. From those days onward I've been reading his interesting thoughts from his blog and his books. This book I bought directly from him in Dare Festival last fall. So I could say I'm a fan.

I believe he is one the leading management thinkers in the world right now. What I especially like is the realism in his thoughts. There are so many people who are much too idealistic about different practices that they seem to forget the laws of business, that relies behind it all. Jurgen seems to always remember the reality in his thoughts.

The book itself is really valuable from cover to cover. For myself there were quire many things I've either run into in other sources or read from Jurgen himself earlier, but it is always valuable to get good recap on things.

Book is quite long and thick, it is over 500 pages. That made it bit scary to start with. Fortunately it is filled with colorful illustrations and good examples. So it isn't that long to read as it seems to be. And like said earlier, the whole book is full of important topics, so I recommend to give it a try.

There are too many important topics in the book to start raising any special ones tot the actual review. All the subjects concentrate on improving workplaces and organizations. It talks lot about management, but management doesn't mean actually supervisor management, but more managing ourselves, our peers and the full organization.

It is important and enjoyable book and highly recommend everyone to read it. Hearing and understanding these ideas will eventually lead in to better organizations and better work places.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Role of the line management in the future - is there one?

Line management has a long history and quite often a special place in organizations. Line manager position have been something people are going after. Things have been changing, role of line management has been fading and even in some case going away. Still all organizations have some kind of line management. There's someone in every organization who is the boss.

Role of the line management in the future organizations is a difficult question. In one hand line management has it's role of bringing comfort and safety for the people, but then on the other hand it can slow down work, create competing priorities and even demotivate people. Especially difficult it is when line management has ties with operational responsibilities and company size grows over one team doing it all mentality.

In the past line management have had lot of operational responsibilities. Line manager used to be responsible that his or her people did their jobs properly. Also line managers did have content and operational responsibilities. They had to make sure right things were done and also in the right ways. That still seems quite natural, it's quite hard to guide if they can't also affect on the work their people are doing.

Then line managers started to get more and more responsibilities of the soft side of people. How people are doing? How they are developing themselves? And what worries they have? At that time there started to come more operational and content related guidance from other sources and line management didn't have that much to say about the content their people were working with.

Nowadays line management in many occasions have become almost totally HR function. Line managers arrange the one to one discussions with people, focusing on personal development and in some companies also to set targets.

Future of line management

Do we really need line management in the future organizations? What if we wouldn't have line management at all. No one couldn't tell people what to do and people would need to figure out themselves. I bet this would work in many cases. There are even examples of self guiding organizations, where people just make things happen. No guidance needed.

This sounds like an optimal approach. No one would have boss whom they would need to report to and no one would ever come to say what to do. Even though it feels like an utopia I believe organizations could work without any line management. From content point of view I don't believe people need to be told what to do, they can figure things out themselves.

So is there anything line management is still needed then? I can see two important points. First people need safety. People need to have someone they can count on in case there is something they can't figure out themselves. Things like this can be about company functions as pay or healthcare or then about how people behave. Once in a while there are misconducts and then it is important that there is line manager to help.

Second important point is personal development. It's rare that people would be that good on analyzing their own competences and the improvement needs that they wouldn't benefit from having a good teacher or coach to help them. This is what line management has a proper place in organizations. Line managers can help with competencies and guide and push people to develop their competence to right direction. They can also work as enablers to get training, coaching and peer learning from other people.

Both of these activities, safety and competence development doesn't actually need people to be bosses. The people responsible for these in organizations do need to have certain authority to do these jobs well, but they don't need to be supervisors in the old sense. I believe role of line management can actually be a service in the future. Many aspect of line management already are handled as a service, but maybe all of it could be.

So do people really need just one supervisor to help them. Why they couldn't have a small group of them working as a service guiding and helping people on in all the necessary ways. Somehow I feel this change wouldn't actually be that big to the ways many companies are already working. The change would be mainly mental. Line manager wouldn't mean your boss anymore, it would almost mean that you would be the boss and line manager would be the servant.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Hiring new manager is not only solution when there is too many things to manage

In past years I've had the luxury to work with few companies growing from being small to becoming middle sized. It's been great to learn from them and also give something back to them.

One thing that have happened in all of these companies, is that there becomes too many things for certain person to control or manage. That's natural, when companies grow there comes more and more business or product related questions someone needs to solve.

The problematic question is that how to cope with that situation. Often the first solution that comes in mind is to hire a new person to handle the increased workload. Too often this is also the only solution companies know off and decide on hiring a person to handle that workload.

Recruiting in many ways is the most important factor affecting long term success of companies. Companies tend to hire too fast, incompetent people and to wrong roles. For some reason universally it seems to be easier to get the permission to hire more managers or other supporting persons than actually the people who do the value work. In the simplest possible setup, companies only need to have product development guys and sales. Everything else can be questioned.

There are other solutions to increased workload. The first solution to think, should always be, are all of the increased workload really valuable work. Could some of the work just be dropped as a waste. Every company has lot of waste work, meaning things that never have any affect to the end product or to the value customer gets or efficiency overall. Everyone knows in their heart, that they've done some waste work sometimes. Most will do some waste work every week.

Second solution for increased workload is sharing the responsibility. When one can't handle all the things they should, they should first think, how to make sure that all of the necessary things could happen without adding a new person to the group. With proper planning existing people can most often handle all of the necessary things in time. Sharing the responsibilities and giving a good direction most often helps. Most people are willing to take the extra responsibility when given a possibility.

I've never faced a company that would have too few middle management. I count Product Management, Marketing, HR and these kind functions to middle management. Few companies I've seen could have benefited from having some people working for internal tools and processes, but never from having more managers to manage business.

Of course companies need to hire new people when they are growing. Once in a while there is a true need for person to the middle layer. Companies just need to be really careful on hiring them. People in middle layer will come busy and can keep themselves busy. There is always more work than can be done. Key is to know when that work is actually valuable to the company and needs a new hire and when not.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book Review: Management 3.0 by Jurgen Appelo

Management 3.0: Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders by Jurgen Appelo was one of the books that I've planned to read for a long time. The positive thing about reading it now and not earlier, is that I was much more ready to understand the book than I was few years ago.

Management 3.0 is an excellent book. Even though the name might promise a one more management model to learn, Jurgen Appelo tells that there isn't a model that would suit all. To be more precise, Jurgen tells that all models have their flaws. He does say that models are important, but we need to remember that all companies, products, people and environment are different in every case.

Jurgen does give his view on what is important in Management in the future. His model has six major themes, which start from energizing people and go all the way to improve everything. He goes all his themes through with very extensive walk-through of underlying knowledge on each of the areas. He explains things thoroughly, but still interestingly.

I really liked the book. It was excellent reading and widened my view of the importance of people in companies. It does discuss about many of the same issues that other Agile books, but it does add lot of new ideas to the discussion.

I recommend this book to managers in product development companies and others who are interested on how the whole companies should be organized. It's a great book and I promise you won't be disappointed.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book Review: Adventures of Bystander by Peter F. Drucker

Adventures of Bystander was not a book I would have selected to be read myself, but when I got the book from my sister's husband when they moved abroad, I decided to read it. Author Peter F. Drucker was somewhat familiar to me, but this book was not.

Peter Drucker is famous management thinker, so I had expectations that this book would have had more about management. It really didn't. It's a book about Mr Drucker's life and interesting people he had known.
And he really had known many important persons from 20th century.

Book tells about interesting people, but also about life during and after World War II. Drucker is originally from Vienna and left Austria bit before nazis conquered the city. He lived in London and New York and worked with many magazines, universities and interesting companies.

Some people introduced in the book are genuinely interesting, others seem to mentioned because them being famous. The interesting people were interesting to read, the famous people not that much.

Book is divided to the stories going Mr Drucker's life through quite chronologically. Of course people are followed through their lifetime, but stories start from Drucker's order of knowing the people.

History is important and quite often interesting. Sometimes it's just plain boring with lots of names and happenings on politics. Time to time I was really keen on reading and sometimes I couldn't cared less to read. That summaries my thinking about the book. Half of it is really good, half quite boring.

It's difficult to recommend this book. If you are fan of Peter Drucker it's a must book to read. If you like history of Europe and US after 1930, this is a good book. If you like biographies, it's a different one and you might like it. For me, it wasn't that good.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Example from Steve Jobs - what really is important for a leader

I was watching a video series from Derek Sivers (founder of CDBaby) made exclusively to Arctic 15 conference. In one of the videos he talks about the fact that nobody knows the future. The actual video and idea is interesting, but what was even more interesting was when Derek told about Apple being in contact with him after iTunes launch. After reading Inside Steve's brain, this part popped up to me so nicely.

Derek went to Apple and was waiting for some guys from marketing to come to talk with him, but actually Steve Jobs himself popped in and started selling his great idea of buying all the music rights from him. This is perfect learning for all managers and leaders out there. Steve Jobs saw this to be such an essential part of iTunes and Apple success that he got hit hands on to convince Derek to sell rights through his company to Apple. So often manager assigns things to others to complete and just watches from above or side that everything progresses as though. There always are battles that managers should take part. Too often too much is delegated.

Please check either the full video (only 4:50 long) or then jump directly to the part where he talks about being invited to Apple (from 3:15 onwards).

Derek Sivers. Uncommon Sense. 3-of-8. Nobody knows the future. from Derek Sivers on Vimeo.

If you liked this video, 7 out of 8 of the whole series of  Derek's speeches are found from here: Arctic15 Exclusive: Derek Sivers - Uncommon Sense. Last one wasn't announced yet, but I would guess the link to this upcoming post is this.  

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Self organizing teams - is it the best practise or a myth?

In many management literature and methodologies self organizing teams have been thought to be the best ones. This is one thing I've never really understood. I have a background from many sports and I don't know a single team in the history of sports which would have been successful as self organizing one. Also I haven't met many self organizing teams which would work really well. Is the whole thing just beautiful thought or is the concept of self organizing team misunderstood? Or is it just me?

How I see self organizing teams are understood and also how I've understood it, is that self organizing team is a team which is independent, can solve problems on their own, are capable of best solutions due to being all-inclusive (having the necessary skills) and also are able to divide their work on most effective way using the intelligence of the group (self led). This is the idea what this writing is based on.

Many Agile SW development frameworks proposes self organizing teams as the basis for the whole framework to work. Argumentation is that teams are much motivated when they have empowerment to decide about their work. Also they commit and keep their promises much better because they have the possibility to make the decisions about their own work. This all makes sense, almost everyone likes when they get to choose how they do things and what they commit to.

At this point I always start to think on sports. Why there's so many coaches and people around the teams to help them do better? Doesn't the guys in the field know the best how to handle different situations? Doesn't experiences teams know how to adapt to changes in the field themselves? Why sport teams are not self organizing?

Some of the best teams in the world are really capable to handle many situations themselves. And yes the teams are in the field themselves and reacting themselves. But what is different is that they have been prepared to handle many of the situations up front. They have been learning different ways to approach the problem. They have in their minds playbook full of way's to tackle the problem they come in to. They have been preparing, they are most often ready for the challenge ahead. Even for surprising things, they may have common rules to follow to mitigate the potential danger. All this is done with the help outside of the team in the field.

It's easy to argue that sports are different than work life teams. Sport teams train much more and actually "work" much less, and on the other hand work teams "work" most of the time and almost never practice. As said sport teams have much more support personnel and work teams have much less. Also with sport teams there's more strict rules to follow that with work teams. But are those still such a different ones. Team is a team whatever the game is or whatever the purpose is.

Now coming back to the self directing team thinking. Does team really need to be independent? It would make sense that teams would have the best possible knowledge to tackle any given task. Most often there's someone out of the team who has some more insights and ideas on ways to tackle the task. Team can never be complete, there's always some competence out of the team that would be beneficial for the team. Always.

What about the self organizing/self led teams then, is self organizing the best way to organize? Is getting the job done the same thing as doing a good job? Sure all teams can self organize, always they do come up with some solution how to divide the work and so forth. Many experienced teams might even do a really good job, but many teams unfortunately don't. Often the result is not leading to learning and using the best people to work on most important issues. Self organizing tends to please everyone in the team and on that way might not be the best thing for the team or the product they are working on.

The main catch with self organizing team is the motivating aspect. Possibility to control your own work and doings is motivating. Doing what you desire leads to the best results in long run. Still true motivation is self centric, it evolves from personal desire's and ambitions and in this case requires that the thing team does is motivating as such. Then there's an extra motivation coming from the possibility to affect more on the things you should be doing.

I think concept of self organizing teams might have been misunderstood a bit. True value of the team comes from it's capability to be more valuable with co-operation than it's individuals would be themselves. Team can be always detected to be a team, but the boundaries of the team aren't always that clear. Is a soccer team only the guys in the field? What about the guys in the bench? What about the guys participating in training? Or all the supporting people, are they part of the team? What actually matters is the result, not the team composition. Teams in work life could also be more open and loosen the boundaries of the team to be able to respond and get help from outside always when needed.

If you think sports teams there's always people to help. Coaches help building the competences all the time, during practices, games and all the time between. Also other support personnel react when there is need to get help for someone. All of these share the common goal and work towards the same target, still only part of these do actual visible work. Maybe this would be a place for work life organizations to learn. Maybe there could be much more coaches and supporting personnel to help, advice, boost and even watch over the team, to make sure team performs and learns the optimal way.

Sure there's many questions that how would this work out in real work life, but I encourage you to look outside the box and really try to reason why the teams need to be self organizing and self led. Is it really the best alternative out there. Could there be some other alternatives which would maybe take some of the freedom away, but would actually boost the effectiveness on the other hand.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen