Dr. Mario's 2nd 🧠

đź“– Slack. Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

13 min read

Highlights

The fact that you’ve decided to read this book says that you are busy.

Efficiency → Slowness

Slack is the natural enemy of efficiency, and efficiency is the natural enemy of slack. And there is the rub: There are things you can do to make an organization more efficient that interfere with its ability to change and reinvent itself later. (p. 1)

What are they, after all, those middle managers? What are they but fat? What do they really exist for other than to be cut out in the interest of efficiency? (…) The main activity of those [middle] managers is reinvention. It is the middle of the organization where reinvention takes place. (p. 4)

Very successful companies have never struck me as particularly busy; in fact, they are, as a group, rather laid-back. Energy is evident in the workplace, but it’s not the energy tinged with fear that comes from being slightly behind on everything. (p. 7)

Making efficient use of workers in the sense of removing all slack from their day has an attendant cost in responsiveness and results directly in slowing the organization down. (p. 11)

everybody needs to have some capacity to devote to change. (p. 34)

Slack is the way you invest in change. Slack represents operational capacity sacrificed in the interests of long-term health (p. 35)

Control slack

Autonomy, as in đź“– Drive. The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

If you buy the notion that Eve is motivated largely by her craving for personal growth, then you’ll understand why she cannot allow herself to be too closely controlled. She will see control as her main growth opportunity. (p. 30)

…model for control-sharing. If control is in some sense like salary, then control-sharing ought to be (or at least seem to be) proportional to salary. If you have ten people working for you and you make 25 percent more than each of them, then you get 125 “control points,” and they get 100 each. If control is exercised in those proportions—or seems to be—then Eve and all her colleagues will feel that their opportunities for growth are maximized. The trick is how to assure your own requirements of the organization with just those 125 control points. (p. 31)

You have to use your authority so sparingly that no one notices that it’s being used. (p. 31)

Push the lever all the way down and the pressure is at its maximum. Now, what’s your tactic for use of the lever? (p. 46)

“People under time pressure don’t think faster.”    —Tim Lister (p. 50)

Think rate is fixed. No matter what you do, no matter how hard you try, you can’t pick up the pace of thinking. (…) the galley slave model is entirely wrong for knowledge workers. Since they can’t alter the rate of mental discriminations (basic elements of knowledge work) per second, their potential to respond to pressure is severely limited. All they can do is:

  • Eliminate wasted time.
  • Defer tasks that are not on the critical path.
  • Stay late.

But the author points out that people is already frustrated by wasted time so the will not be likely be wasting much time, and they already derive satisfaction from accomplishment, so they won’t be likely wanting to work on task in wrong order. So, the only thing we are doing is pushing them to stay late (which is something they won’t be able to do for long). With software developers, I’m not sure this checks out, since there is satisfaction derived from the activity itself (^a5d71e, and some that somewhat gave up the idea of having any type of impact, the “I’d rather be fishing” guy of 📖 Developer Hegemony).

This lowest level workers are usually platform teams:

When a schedule is not met, those inclined to pass out blame are quick to point at the lowest-level workers; they reason that performance is the domain entirely of those who perform the work. (p. 57)

By the way, regarding platform teams, and Nobody wants to be a Data Engineer:

It’s nearly impossible to keep people who have zero-status jobs; give the guy a nice loud machine to boost his ego and maybe he’ll stick around for a while (p. 76)

Managing

Assigning yourself to an unfilled position in your domain means that you unassign yourself (at least partially) from the task of managing that domain. It shouldn’t be necessary to say this to any manager, but unfortunately it is: Management matters. Yes, the uncovered task matters too, but not as much (p. 82)

In a sufficiently overstressed organization, it is positively unsafe to manage. Only the work itself—the lowest-level work, such as making product—keeps you safe. So if you manage at all, that has to be a parttime task. The rest of the time you are making product, bringing in revenue. Bringing in revenue makes you safe; the time you spend managing therefore won’t count too heavily against you … provided you keep it to a minimum. This is hardly a formula for thoughtful management (p. 84)

Management is hard because the skills are inherently difficult to master. Your mastery of them will affect your organization more than anything going on under you. Running away from the challenge doesn’t help. (p. 86)

Other highlights

  • The people who are fired are, on average, more competent than the people who aren’t. (Location 1159)

  • Meeting the deadline is not what this is all about. What this is about is looking like you’re trying your damnedest to meet the deadline. (Location 1231)

  • In this age of “lean and mean,” it is positively unsafe for you to run the project with a lean (optimal) staff. (Location 1232)

  • This is a model that deviates from Taylorism in nearly every way. The vehicle team is made up of generalists, not specialists. (Location 1401)

  • Somewhat lost is the flexibility to move people from one team to another, since over time the teams may begin to deviate substantially from each other. Offsetting this loss is a much more interesting workday for the workers, enhanced identification with the product (and its customer), lower turnover, and strongly felt loyalties to the team and to the corporation. (Location 1410)

  • there were marked differences in how they managed their networks of connections, liaisons to fellow workers whose cooperation was required to get anything done. (Location 1423)

  • standard processes for knowledge work are almost always empty at their center. (Location 1442)

  • “I will dictate to you exactly how you must do every aspect of the work … except the hard part.” (Location 1447)

  • You can’t empower anyone without taking chances. (Location 1460)

  • Process standardization from on high is disempowerment. (Location 1464) (Standarization in teams within an org).

  • a basically good product may be marred by defects (think of your Internet browser, whichever one you use). But real quality is far more a matter of what it does for you and how it changes you (Location 1531)

  • This relationship suggests a daring strategy for quality improvement: reduce quantity. (Location 1571)

    • Note: Also in life?

  • they’re prone to get their tactics right but not their strategy. But tactics are a lot easier than strategy. (Location 1630)

  • Directing an entire organization is hard. Seeming to direct it, on the other hand, is easy. All you have to do is note which way the drift is moving and instruct the organization to go that way. (Location 1639)

  • Fisher’s fundamental theorem: “The more highly adapted an organism becomes, the less adaptable it is to any new change.” (Location 1645)

  • didn’t we agree that if we had to choose between effectiveness and efficiency, we’d choose effectiveness every time? That the alternative makes no sense at all? How, then, is it possible that companies are routinely making exactly the no-sense choice? What on earth would cause them to favor efficient over effective? (Location 1656)

  • ingenuous belief that success of the overall organization can be viewed as a simple arithmetic combination of lower-level objectives. (Location 1679)

  • Companies that are succeeding today have very little stasis. (Location 1684)

  • MBO is to an organization what Soviet-style central planning is to an economy: an idea whose time has passed. (Location 1713)

  • A little bit easier, however, is to know “who we aren’t.” (Location 1753)

  • If nothing is declared unchangeable, then the organization will resist all change. When there is no defining vision, the only way the organization can define itself is its stasis. Like (Location 1767) id:: 56b89ae3-2cb8-4d26-a687-2b1981b3dc09

  • the ability to enroll other people in your agenda. (Location 1806)

  • We need leadership for this, because we all tend to be short-term thinkers. (Location 1808)

  • Lack of power is a great excuse for failure, but sufficient power is never a necessary condition of leadership. There is never sufficient power. In fact, it is success in the absence of sufficient power that defines leadership. (Location 1834)

  • It’s enrolling someone who is distinctly outside the scope of your official power base that constitutes real leadership. (Location 1845)

  • Learning, the key activity of meaningful change, is not antithetical to fear. I will go so far as to suggest (in Chapter 26 just ahead) that fear is a constant in any kind of essential learning. (Location 1923)

  • Paradoxically, the fear of breaking your neck (translation in corporate terms: losing your job) does not make change impossible. It’s a much more insidious kind of fear that interferes with change: the fear of mockery. (Location 1936)

    • Note: In other words: shame

  • there is no possibility of achieving trustworthiness except through the mechanism of undeserved trust. (Location 1969)

  • slightly in advance of demonstrated trustworthiness. (Location 1975)

  • picking up not-yet-deserved trust requires substantial personal magnetism. (Location 1982)

  • They give responsibility well before it’s been completely earned. They know when to turn their backs and take their chances. (Location 1997)

  • You have to have an unerring sense of how much the person is ready for. Setting people up for failure doesn’t make them loyal to you; you have to set them up for success. (Location 2006)

  • the period of sudden decline of corporate fortunes is exactly the worst moment to introduce a change. People are uneasy about their jobs, worried about lasting corporate health, perhaps shocked by the vitality of the competition. (Location 2040)

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  • And corporate reinvention requires a deep involvement in the day-to-day business of the organization, something that top management is no longer likely to have. (Location 2059)

  • If reinvention doesn’t happen at the top and it doesn’t happen at the bottom, there is only one possibility remaining: It’s got to happen in the middle. (Location 2063)

  • If the essential task of middle managers is reinvention, when is that task to be carried out? The answer is, during time that is not used up directing the day-to-day business. The fact that managers have time on their hands (i.e., their operations tasks use up less than eight hours per day) gives them time for reinvention. (Location 2075)

  • Sufficient slack is not the only necessary ingredient for reinvention. Middle-level managers need to work together to conceive of and make any meaningful change happen. (Location 2083)

  • we tend to sop up new knowledge like sponges when the thing we’re learning is largely irrelevant to us, and resist learning things that really matter. (Location 2115)

  • learning of those things that really matter, that change the way we do essential, self-definitional work. And for that kind of learning, the full environment is almost a necessity. (Location 2124)

  • teams? It’s not uncommon to see real teams as a phenomenon of only the bottom level of the hierarchy. When that’s true, you have to wonder: Are we set up to learn only at the bottom level? Do we have teams where learning really matters? (Location 2156)

  • young managers are often supplied a bit of management training. The problem with such training is that it’s all abstraction and no example. It (Location 2169)

  • People who own nothing in common may be called a team, but they aren’t. (Location 2191)

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  • There is no such thing as “healthy” competition within a knowledge organization; all internal competition is destructive. (Location 2236)

  • Influence in the hands of a talented manager can accomplish more than full control in the hands of someone who is talent-free. (Location 2320)

  • It’s never enough to promise people that benefits coming at some later date will make the change all seem worthwhile. The harsh reality confronting this new manager is that the key activity of change management (the building of trust) had to be done before the change was even given a name. (Location 2348)

  • you can’t count on dodging all risk consequences. You need to set aside some slack of time and money to accommodate a likely break on risks that materialize as opposed to those that evaporate. The science of risk management guides you as to how much slack to provide. (Location 2383)

  • Stochastic control may be fine for the company, but not so good for an individual manager who comes up a winner or a loser based on a single undertaking. (Location 2419)

  • When they learn that assurances about dates are empty posturing, they have no way to know what real risks they’re running. That forces them to be much more conservative, imagining the worst. The (Location 2459)

  • Without sensible risk management, organizations are prone to become stubbornly risk-averse. (Location 2461)

  • List and count each risk. 2. Have an ongoing process for discovering new risks. 3. Quantify each one as to its potential impact and likelihood. 4. Designate a transition indicator for each one that will tell you (early, I hope) that the risk is beginning to materialize. 5. Set down in advance what your plan will be to cope with each risk should it begin to materialize. (Location 2516)

  • there is a disturbing tendency to ignore such pre-materialization work because it violates an unwritten rule: Don’t do work that might not have to be done. (Location 2565)

  • Mitigation is the jewel in the crown of risk management. If you can’t do mitigation (can’t take action now to make future risk-containing action possible or reduce its cost), you can’t do risk management. (Location 2605)

  • The difference between the early nineties and today is the difference between Lenin’s concept of revolution (destroy the old state and replace it with a new and better one) and Trotsky’s concept of continuing revolution (destroy the old state and also destroy each successive state that replaces it). (Location 2623)

  • If you’re doing some work that could be done without real risk management, that, too, is a clue that you need to redirect your resources. If risk management seems like overkill, you may be in full risk-avoidance mode. (Location 2638)

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