buckleyPLANET

Summer Running Projects

I reached a huge goal this past week by running in the inaugural Seattle Rock and Roll Marathon. I did the entire 26.2 miles in 5:11 – not the fastest, and about 30 minutes slower than I had intended, but happy to have reached this milestone and had the experience. Now I can focus on improving my time. The pic above is of me about to cross the finish line. While I don’t expect to ever qualify for Boston, I do plan to make this a biannual occurrence. I’m hoping to run a second full marathon later this year – possibly the California International Marathon in early December. The weather is always beautiful that time of year in Northern California, and the course is pretty much downhill from Folsom to the Capital.

It was a beautiful day for the Rock and Roll. My favorite part was running across I-90 out to Mercer Island and back, and then across the top of the viaduct. With plans to tear down the viaduct and build an underground highway along the water, I wonder if last weekend’s race will be the last time anyone gets to see Seattle from that vantage point? It was an incredible view, with not a cloud in the sky. Least favorite part – running through the tunnels all the way up to Queen Anne hill. Running across the Union Lake bridge, watching the faster runners pass by on my right, was the most difficult for me.

Prior to the Rock and Roll, I also ran my first 10k out here in Duvall, as part of the Duvall Days festivities. A bit fast for me. I’ve run “the hill” on plenty of occasions (pictured below, left), but not that fast. I completed the 6-mile course in just over 54 minutes, and enjoyed the light drizzle of rain. I’ve decided that I prefer running in the rain, in fact.

My legs are still a bit sore this week, but I am planning to head into the gym this afternoon for a couple hours, then get a deep tissue massage. It’s all good.

 

I'm a PC, and I got just what I wanted

I know I'm a couple weeks behind on this news, but the latest I'm A PC campaign ads with Lauren, a real PC buyer, is excellent marketing, and, frankly, is another reason to be proud of working here at Microsoft. Great ad concept, great delivery, and it drives home the message: you get more for the money on a PC. Love it.

Managing to the Metrics

Since my team runs the operational metrics for my organization, I've had some interesting conversations within my team and with some of my peers around the nature of operational metrics, and the uncanny ability for our engineering teams to figure out ways to "game" the system. Not to say that they are abusing the system -- it's just human nature to understand the parameters around which we are being measured and to do everything possible to "optimize" our performance within those boundaries. While reading Joel Spolsky's book Smart & Gets Things Done about how to find, hire, and retain the best engineering team, one section really jumped out at me. Joel was discussing a book and study conducted by Robert D. Austin from Harvard Business School called Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations, and stated:

"People are not chemistry experiments, because they are self-aware, and when you try to measure things about them, they're aware of this, and they have brains they can use to get the measurement to look the way you want it to look.

"(Austin) shows that whenever you institute a new metric in a knowledge organization, that is, any organization with workers who need to do something more complicated than screwing caps on toothpaste tubes, at first you see genuine improvement of the thing you want to measure. The programmers do, actually, try to write more code every day. But very soon what you see is that the workers figure out shortcuts, so that metrics start to go through the roof, while the actual performance actually declines, because programmers start spending more time optimizing for metrics, which comes at the cost of the quality of work that they do.

More importantly, this is not just because you haven't figured out the perfect metric. It's the very nature of knowledge work."

Nick Tunes

I'm very proud of my middle son, Nick. At the beginning of the school year, he came to us and asked if he could play an instrument this year, and was interested specifically in clarinet. After the first couple weeks, we didn't hear him practicing much around the house, and wondered whether this would last long. But he claimed to be doing just fine, and wanted to continue. And then one day, Nick approached my daughter and I, who were sitting reading in the family room, whether we wanted to hear him play a new song he learned. Not only did he do well, he shocked Audrey because he had learned to read music. She freaked a bit. "Wait a second...you can read music? When did you learn to read music? I've been trying to teach myself piano for a couple years, and in 2 months you can read music?"

His school organized a show last week, where Nick and his musical buddy performed a duet. They did a fantastic job.

Building on Good Ideas

In his book Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky discusses the paper The Social Origins of Good Ideas, authored by Ronald Burt at the University of Chicago, and says a couple things that really resonate with me on the importance of your social network in interpreting and acknowledging innovation, and the effect of closed networks (within your working team) at discouraging or ignoring good ideas. Speaking about Burt, Shirky says:

"In his analysis, a dense social network of people in the same department (and who were therefore likely to be personally connected to one another) seemed to create an echo-chamber effect."

In other words, familiarity discourages ideas. Shirky uses the term "bridging" to describe the action of extending one's network broadly, versus deepening relationships within an existing network, as an important aspect of vetting an idea across a diverse set of people. Sharing these ideas within the "echo-chamber" limits the potential of your idea (the effectiveness of your argument within your familiar circle). Reading this, I instantly thought back to my teenage years when I recognized the reality that you are never popular in the town where you grow up. However, as soon as I moved, I was that 'mysterious new kid' and the girls paid a little more attention (until they got to know me, at least). :-)  It also made me think about how easily people will accept the wisdom of a consultant over the voices of internal teams.

Shirky concludes that the most successful "idea people" are the ones able to reach outside of their primary social networks, connecting to other social networks. He surmised that bridging predicted good ideas, and a lack of bridging generally predicted bad ideas. The trick is setting up a system that allows the consistent identification, validation, and recognition of ideas.

"Even while the judicious use of social connections increases the proportion of good ideas, most ideas are still bad. It's not enough to find some way to increase the successful ideas. Some way needs to be found to tolerate the failures too."

Post-April Foolishness

With my face down in some excellent books on things like social networking analysis and team development, I haven't provided a personal update in quite some time. My wife hates that I add anything personal to these sites, but I figure this site is less intrusive than my Facebook profile. Besides, I have to satisfy my narcissistic tendencies somehow, right?

My running has taken a back seat to life in the past few days, but I hope to get back up to speed this weekend with a planned long run on Saturday on the Snoqualmie River trail through Carnation. It's an amazing run that I enter downtown, usually winding 7 or 8 miles southward toward Fall City, and, eventually, North Bend. The trail just goes up and up, over a couple bodies of water, through some beautiful scenery of the hillside and the valley. I love that run, although I have this fear of mountain lion attacks, what with me running deaf with the music blaring. Good times. I'm prepping for the Wenatchee half-marathon on April 18th, and then will be running in the Seattle Rock-n-Roll full-marathon in late June. I'm psyched. I need to develop calves of steel.

That's about all I wanted to share. Oh, and that I'm working on yet another prank here at work: we're covering one of my team's desks with aluminum foil. Every square inch, in fact. Every small object, pen, card holder - everything - individually in aluminum foil. And then we're bringing in a couple of strobe lights. If it doesn't send him into a seizure, it should be funny. And really obnoxious. I'll be sure to add photos to the BlueBadgeMojo site this weekend.

Management in a Facebook World

I've been reading Clay Shirky's latest book Here Comes Everybody and thinking a lot about how organizations, and specifically the power base behind organizational influence, is evolving right before our eyes. (More on the book in a future post) And then someone points me toward a great article by Gary Hamel out on the Wall Street Journal blog site that outlines this exact shift, and I had to share. Gary compiled "a list of 12 work-relevant characteristics of online life" that I've included below. Follow the link to the article for the entire narrative around each:

1. All ideas compete on an equal footing.
2. Contribution counts for more than credentials.
3. Hierarchies are natural, not prescribed.
4. Leaders serve rather than preside.
5. Tasks are chosen, not assigned.
6. Groups are self-defining and -organizing.
7. Resources get attracted, not allocated.
8. Power comes from sharing information, not hoarding it.
9. Opinions compound and decisions are peer-reviewed.
10. Users can veto most policy decisions.
11. Intrinsic rewards matter most.
12. Hackers are heroes.

Mr. Hamel, you nailed it.

Innovation Attracts A-Players

I was reading Auren Hoffman's latest blog post on why finding A-players is harder in a down economy, and one point he makes really resonated with me:

Tough times often paint companies into a corner and force them into maintenance mode rather than continuing to innovate.  Great players love to innovate and usually NEED to innovate.  It's usually very hard to keep these type of A-players caged-up and thus this presents a big opportunity for recruiting.

For instance, in the past it was really hard to hire great software engineers out of financial behemoths like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JP Morgan Chase.  These companies have outstanding people and pay these people really well (often 50% above the salary at a tech company).  Nowadays, even if these people have not been laid off, the great people are going to be leaving in droves.  Why?  Because in the next two years, it is really doubtful they will be doing anything remotely innovative.  Instead they will be maintaining current systems due to the understaffed and underfunded technology departments.  No fun there so expect a big exodus out of these companies.

Many companies respond to an economic downturn by cutting things like employee perks, R&D, and training. You can readily provide data that justifies the reasoning behind every and every one of these cuts -- and most people will recognize the logic behind these difficult decisions -- but what is the real cost of making these cuts? Are you impacting those factors that could be the threads keeping your A-players intact? As Auren points out:

It's also worth noting that great people are often first to leave sinking ships.  They don't feel they need to stick around for a severance because they are confident they can always get another job.

You can always rationalize your decisions by telling yourself they would have left anyway. Doing your homework and understanding the true implications of your decisions is harder than simply making the cuts, but if you do the hard work and make things visible to your people, you're more likely to build trust and keep those A-players around.

Just thinking out loud here....

SithSigma

I saw this site and laughed out loud. I especially loved the following:

Sith Business Philosophy

Work-Life Balance is a lie, there is only passion.
Through passion, I get promotions.
Through promotions, I gain power.
Through power, I gain victory.
Through victory, my chains are broken.
The Force shall set me free.

The site actually has some fantastic content, focused on management best practices. For example, in his post entitled Ten Principles of Leadership, Darth Sidious shares the following:

When people decide to respect you as a leader, they observe what you do so they can know who you really are.

People then use this observation to tell if you are an honorable and trusted leader, or a self-serving person who misuses authority.

A good leader has an honorable character that selflessly serves his/her organization. In your employees’ eyes, your leadership is everything. Your activities affect the organization’s objectives and their well-being.

A respected leader concentrates on three key areas:

1. “Be” - what he/she is, i.e. beliefs and values

2. “Know” - what he/she knows, i.e. job, tasks, human nature

3. “Do” - what he/she does, i.e. implement, motivate, and provide direction

What makes a person want to follow a leader? People want to be guided by people they respect and who have a clear sense of direction. To gain respect, they must be ethical. A sense of direction is achieved by conveying a strong vision of the future.

Then and Now - eBIG.org

It's amazing how fast time flies. For one, my daughter wants to get a jump on college next year by starting spring term instead of waiting until the fall. The fact that I have a kid a year and half away from entering college is just....well, weird. But I digress. I was searching (via Microsoft's internal Kumo search tool) for a link to an article I wrote a few years back and came across an interview I did for the San Francisco Chronicle's SFGate.com in 2003 on the creation of the East Bay IT Group, a technology non-profit I started with Kristen Kuhns and Patrick Tardif (who now run Eravita and StoryOfMyLife).

There are few things Kristen Kuhns and Christian Buckley would rather do than hang out with their techie brethren, discussing the latest goings-on in the computer industry.

But given that the trek from their homes in Brentwood to the center of the high-tech universe, Silicon Valley, is often the equivalent of a Lewis and Clark expedition, regularly taking advantage of such gatherings is a chore.

That's why Kuhns and Buckley, along with third co-founder Patrick Tardif, formed the East Bay Information Technology Group -- better known as eBIG -- last year. The nonprofit organization aims to create an avenue in which the growing IT community in the East Bay can network, while minimizing battles with SUV-clogged freeways.

When I moved from the Bay Area to Washington State in 2004, I left behind a still growing organization with around 2,000 members -- which had expanded to over 10,000 members by 2007. I remained on the Board of Directors until late 2007 when eBIG was merged with Technology Ventures Corporation, and renamed the East Bay Innovation Group (a better name -- we should have thought of that).

While I am two states away and completely detached from eBIG's progress, it's good to see that it is still up and running. I don't know what their numbers look like, how many members and events they pull in each month, but in these hard economic times, it's good to see that the East Bay has groups like eBIG still providing services catering to the entrepreneur. I wish there was something similar up here in the Seattle area. Hmm....maybe I should start something....