Seeping Matter

Lately I’m seeing a bit of a buzz around a Vanity Fair article written about Microsoft’s annual stack ranking process along with a commentary in Forbes about the same article.  There’s some strong words used in the articles, such as “terrible management technique,” “devastatingly destructive,” “effectively crippled Microsoft,” and “cannibalistic culture.”  I’m willing to bet much of the outrage over this technique (which Microsoft didn’t invent and has certainly been used by many, many large companies) has more to do with fairly uninteresting stock price growth, or lack thereof, especially when compared to the Apple rocketship.

It’s important to keep in mind that the verbage I quoted above is being used to attract readership and sell ads.  That doesn’t necessarily mean that it is wrong though.

If you are unfamiliar, here is stack ranking in a nutshell:  Instead of evaluating employee performance against an objective metric, employees are ranked against each other, from best to worst.  Some criteria are applied to make the samples meaningful, e.g. employees are ranked against others at their same career level and within a right-sized organizational unit (not too large or small).  Then a curve is applied by policy; in Microsoft’s case, the top 20% are considered top-performing and the bottom 20% underperforming, with the middle 60% somewhere in the general vicinity of “average.”  Keep in mind, these rankings have very little to do with what an individual’s actual performance was as compared to an objective metric; in a stack ranking, performance is all relative.

Here’s some other interesting quotes from the Vanity Fair article:  ”It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”  Further on, it reads:  ”It was always much less about how I could become a better engineer and much more about my need to improve my visibility among other managers.”

From my experience, those last two statements are pretty much spot-on.  I clearly remember being told that in order for me to improve my performance at Microsoft I needed to focus on making myself look better than the others on my team.  It was about this time I thought I should start looking around for a new gig.

It’s important to understand why, though.  It wasn’t because I was unable to perform well at Microsoft or that I was unable to execute as well as my peers.  It was because I don’t want to work in that kind of an environment.  It goes against things that are central to my very core.

C.S. Lewis said:  ”Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. . . . It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest.”  On the same topic, Ezra Taft Benson said:  ”Another major portion of this very prevalent sin of pride is enmity toward our fellowmen. We are tempted daily to elevate ourselves above others and diminish them.” And Jeffrey R. Holland said we need to work to “escape our culture’s obsession with comparing, competing, and never feeling we are ‘enough.’”

Those quotes go a long way in describing my feelings on the matter.  In my view, to promote a practice wherein people are forced to compete and be compared against one another is to encourage behavior that I consider sinful:  pride, backstabbing, gossiping, fault-finding, etc.  It is sinful in that it encourages behavior that is not Christlike.

How much better instead to let individual employees work as teams and only compare themselves to an ideal they help to set for themselves!   I may never become the kind of software engineer or husband or father that I could become if my main concern is that I’m better than my immediate peers.  I can instead choose to evaluate my performance against my own ideals and be continuously working and growing.  The role of a manager in this environment is to coach and mentor, not to compare and punish.

One area where I disagree somewhat with the author of the Vanity Fair article is where he suggests this is an “astonishingly foolish management decision” made by Microsoft.  To say such a thing implies that the leadership making this decision is not smart enough to see beforehand the implications of this policy.  Whatever a person may choose to say about Microsoft employees, at any level in the company, “foolish” is not a word I would use to describe any of them.  In my time there I met many individuals at many levels, and to a person every one was incredibly smart, perceptive, aware, and intelligent.

Why would smart, perceptive, aware, and intelligent people then promote a policy that seems so wrong?  I give them the benefit of doubt.  I assume they know exactly what they are doing.  Such a policy will select favorably for people who are willing to do whatever it takes to win, and will adopt any tactic and step on whoever they need to step on to get there.  I don’t believe everyone who is successful at Microsoft is like this, mind you.  But it certainly describes many of the successful people I knew there.  If I wanted to create a culture and a company full people who will do whatever it takes to win, establishing a policy that rewards such behavior is not foolish, it is brilliant strategy.

One critic of the article pointed out that the former employees interviewed may have all been rated poorly, which would certainly skew the numbers.  It’s a fair point, but misses the mark.  The comment also makes two implied assumptions.  The first is that the people who leave are mediocre in their profession, which I can almost assure you is nearly universally not true.  The second is that they left out of frustration with the policy.  This is probably true for some number of former employees, but people leave companies for lots of reasons.  Some may have left because of the policy, not because of frustration, but rather because it does not align with their values.  This was true with me.

So, read the articles and come to your own conclusion, but don’t assume Microsoft doesn’t know what they are doing.  I think they are very intelligently going about trying to create the exact type of culture they want.

Whether that type of culture can remain competitive in the long term, well, that’s a completely different question.

P.S. I also wrote about this topic here, a couple of years ago.

Earlier this week I was taking off my well-used Skullcandy Skullcrusher headphones when, inexplicably, one of the earpieces broke off.  I was pretty bummed about this because I’ve quite liked these headphones.

On a whim, I thought, “Is there any chance they would still be under warranty?”  I’d heard Skullcandy was pretty awesome about such things, but still, these headphones are like three and a half years old.  However, when I went to Skullcandy’s website to try to process the warranty return, it went without a hitch.  Basically the website said, “Were you being irresponsible and stupid when they broke?  No?  Then they are fully covered.”

That’s pretty sweet.

So I sent them back to Skullcandy yesterday.  I went to the UPS store where the clerk made an interesting comment.  He said, “Oh, yes.  We’ve seen a number of people send their headphones back to Skullcandy before.”

It occurred to me that this was potentially an example of how a single metric, taken out of context, could be completely misinterpreted.  The UPS store clerk, probably unintentionally, was nevertheless suggesting that Skullcandy headphones get sent back to Skullcandy more frequently than perhaps some other brands.  One might assume that perhaps Skullcandy headphones get sent back more frequently than headphones by, say, Sennheiser, Grado, AKG, Denon, or Audio-Technica because those headphones are quite a bit more expensive than Skullcandys are, and are therefore presumably of higher quality.

However, this statement also implies that Skullcandys get sent back more frequently than headphones that are much cheaper.  How can that be?

Actually it is pretty easily explained if those cheaper brands do not stand behind their headphones.  If I buy a $70 pair of Skullcandy headphones, being fully aware of the lifetime warranty, I’m much more likely to send those back than a set of $5 junk headphones by some no-name brand that probably don’t have a warranty anyway.  And if that is the case, it is much more likely that the UPS store clerk sees packages getting sent back to Skullcandy more frequently.  Additionally, if I hate the $5 headphones, I’m likely to stop using them when I realize they are junk, so it is likely they will never actually get used enough to break.

In other words, given a simple measurement (frequency of headphones getting sent back), the most obvious explanation (that brand of headphones is low quality) may not necessarily be the correct interpretation, once further context is applied (headphones that sound great will be used more frequently and therefore are more likely to break; broken headphones only get sent back to a company that stands behind their product).

It’s why it is so important to known exactly what you are measuring and to interpret the measurement correctly.  And it’s why it is so important that, as an employee, you understand exactly what measurements are used to determine your performance and how they are interpreted.

Everyone seems pretty upset lately about Netflix’s recent price, uh, “adjustments.”  Where I once got streaming and a DVD in the mail for one low price, now I will be charged separately for each, and to have them both requires quite a big price hike.

Still not that expensive, really.  I mean, regular TV service costs quite a bit more and is much less likely to have anything on worth watching, whereas Netflix always has an episode of Top Gear, Spongebob, or The Office.

Still, everyone is mad.  And by “everyone”, I mean, “everyone with Netflix”, which pretty much means everyone who is alive on planet Earth.  Mad because Netflix is trying to get more money from their loyal customers.  How evil!

Well, I have a different theory.  Don’t get me wrong, I still think Netflix is a for-profit organization and all.  But maybe the strategy here is different.

Suppose, for example, that 75% of current Netflix customers currently get have at least one Netflix DVD out at any given point in time, and also use Netflix streaming to watch stuff online.  Let’s assume, for the sake of the discussion, that with the price adjustments some number of those Netflix customers are going to choose one or the other, Netflix streaming or DVD-by-mail.

Meanwhile, back in Netflix-land, the Netflixers (Netflickers? Netflixen?) have been fruitlessly negotiating with the big, stupid people at the movie industry, trying to get them to make more content available online.  ”See how many online subscribers we have,” they say.  ”See how much more they watch online than by DVD,” they point out.  ”See how much more our customers like online than by mail,” they protest.  ”See how we killed Blockbuster and Hollywood Video,” they mention.  But what happens?  Nothing, because the big stupid movie industry people do not know what a computer is.

So here’s the golden question:  If X is the number of Netflix subscribers who cancel their DVD-by-mail subscription and opt for streaming only, how large must X be such that Netflix can go to the big stupid movie industry people and say, “See, all of these people who used to watch your movies are now watching something else instead because you won’t allow us to stream your content online”?

And what if instead the number who actually cancel DVD-by-mail is X-1, because you decided to pay for both?  Wouldn’t you regret that?  Yes, you definitely would, because the rest of us would have to come and beat on you.

So don’t boycott Netflix, just boycott DVD-by-mail.  Help Netflix win the fight against the big stupid movie industry people to get more streaming content available for all of us!  A vote for Netflix Streaming is a vote for progress everywhere!

We may not get a balanced budget or stop fighting pointless wars in other countries, but by golly we can win this one.  Do your part and vote with your dollars (8 of them) today!

I have a good friend named Chris Cooper.  (No, not the actor.)  I worked for Chris for many years when he was Director of Developer Services at Novell; now, Chris is a partner with UV Partners, a venture capital firm in Salt Lake City.

Working for Coop (he goes by Coop, not Chris; calling him Chris seems weird) was a very important educational experience for me, primarily because Coop is a businessman, not a technologist, by background.  Because of this, Chris taught me things about the software business that no other manager or director that I’ve worked for has been able to teach me.  In particular, Coop helped me understand many of the reasons why Novell made some of the decisions they made, and why they didn’t make others I thought they should.  Knowing this doesn’t mean that they are right, but it certainly helped me to gain a different perspective.

Some time ago I had the opportunity to meet Coop for lunch in Salt Lake City.  I asked him how he was liking his work and he gushed about how much he loved his job.  Then he admitted, “You know, I never would have even considered this as a career opportunity for me, let alone would I have thought I would like it so much.”  He briefly covered his background — education in business, joined Novell as a sales representative, established key relationships with others, always tried to execute in his assigned role — and then this opportunity played out for him.  We discussed how odd it is that as young people we fret so much about which major to choose and which college to go to and which classes to take and which job opportunity to pursue, almost as though we think that the sum of of these decisions is going to head us down a career freeway, at high speed towards a specific destination, with no exits or detours or scenic byways, when in fact many, many people end up somewhere completely different from what they had planned.

I mentioned this later to a long-time friend who had spent many years in his chosen profession as a physical therapist before making a career change to sell educational technology to schools (yeah, I know!).  Of course he could really identify with this.  He said that often we think of our career not only as a path, but as a freeway like I just mentioned.  But in fact, he said, our career is more like a waterway.  It might be a little stream, or a large river; it might be straight or twisty; it might be fast-moving and exiting, full of whitewater rapids, or it might be slow and steady, if somewhat boring.

He continued the analogy by saying that as you float along the waterway you’ve chosen, you might eventually realize, “Uh, I don’t think this is going where I want to go anymore.”  Maybe it started out going the direction you wanted, but quickly or gradually turned a different way.  Maybe you thought it was heading one direction, only to find that it actually wasn’t heading where you thought it was.  Or maybe it is still going where you once thought it was, but you’ve changed your mind about what you want.  Clearly, if you want to end up where you intended to go, you’ll have to pull your raft out of the waterway and choose another one.

That’s why I say, your career path probably isn’t.  It probably is a waterway.

This is why this post over the weekend by Seth Godin really stood out to me.  I’ve got a big extended family with lots of younger people (siblings, siblings-in-law, cousins, etc.) for me to give advice to that they can quickly ignore.  I’ve seen many of them struggle with this.  They choose a major because it is easy instead of choosing a major because it is interesting, or they don’t finish their degree at all, or they don’t even make choices in college or a career because they are afraid to commit their whole life to it.  I believe in the value of education, but sometimes I’ve wondered why it matters at all if your career is so much left to chance?

Seth’s post identifies the link for me.  Education should be preparing you to take the choices as they become available to you.  You might have a career endpoint in mind, but you can’t be so in love with that endpoint that you won’t consider opportunities and alternatives that become available to you along the way.  How do you even know you will like that endpoint anyway?  Fretting about choosing the right endpoint is pointless.  Your career isn’t a path, it is a waterway.  You don’t know whether the waterway leads where you want or not; you choose one based on the best available knowledge and judgment you have at the time.  You can always get out and choose another one.  So just get in and get started!

Last week Novell announced that they are finally getting rid of their CTO, Jeff Jaffe.  It’s buried in the press release, but if you look hard enough you’ll find it.

It’s really too bad, because this press release really did not do much in the way of raising Novell’s stock price.  It must be because the news of Jaffe’s departure is buried.  If Novell had made a press release just about that, stock would surely have gone up.

As far as Novell goes, things can only get better.  I heard people were literally cheering in the hallways when they heard the news.  No, I’m not making that up.

Understand, I don’t have anything against Jaffe personally, so this isn’t meant as a personal attack.  I really don’t want to get too critical of people, generally.  But the fact that Jeff Jaffe was a CXO-level professional says a lot about what is wrong with corporate America in general, and Novell in particular.  He was very well compensated because he was expected to lead the company, but instead people at Novell wonder what he even got paid anything for at all.  If you had worked at Novell, you would know what I mean.

In a technical company like Novell, the CTO, if you have one, is expected to provide the technical leadership.  What products should we be focusing on?  What company strengths are we going to leverage?  Who is our target market and our customer?  What is our go-to-market strategy?  What is our partnering and third-party-developer strategy?  You’d expect a CTO to be intimately aware of all this stuff, and providing clear, consistent, and frequent direction to his engineering core to help bring about a technical vision that will win in the market place.

Jaffe’s strategy, on the other hand, was to completely disappear.

In fact, the only time I can ever remember him saying anything at all was just after he’d held a two-week-long brainstorming session with a bunch of his distinguished engineers.  I knew they were doing it, because it was going on in a conference room on my floor at Novell, right by the bathrooms and the elevators.

Presumably, the purpose of this session was to get the Novell brain trust together and answer questions like these to come up with a competitive strategy.  Of course, I wasn’t in the meetings, but the accounts I heard were a bit different from what I’d expected.  Apparently Jaffe went into the meetings with an idea of what the strategy was.  The first week was spent with the distinguished engineers trying to help him see that his strategy was not going to work.  Towards the end of that week they collectively gave up, and spent the second week trying to figure out how to not make his strategy sound so ridiculous.

A few days after the meetings, he announced his strategy in a company-wide conference call.  Basically the strategy was this:

• The open source community is full of people who like to develop software and give it away for free.  They just like to work on interesting projects.
• We like to make money on software and we have lots of great ideas.
• Thus, perfect synergy.  We will give the open source community ideas of software to create that will make us money.  Since they have nothing better to do, the open source community will gladly make this software for us.  Then our engineers will add a few key features, tie pretty bows around it, and sell it.

This same day I received an offer to work for Mozy.  It was pretty clear that Jaffe’s strategy was a joke.  Embarrassing, even.  I remember thinking, “Things are never going to change around here if this is the best strategy our CTO can come up with.”

I was pretty discouraged about it.  It is hard to work for management that doesn’t instill confidence.  It is really surprising to me that a person could make the kind of salary he made with the kind of title he had and still do such a lousy job of leading.  How in the world did he ever get the job in the first place?

After the call, I walked to the office of a teammate to vent about it.  I told him, “I know in the past I’ve joked about some of the decisions different people in our upper management team have made, and I’ve quipped, ‘I could do their job better than that!’  Of course, we both know that I was kidding.  But this time, I’m completely serious when I say this:  I could do the CTO job better than Jeff Jaffe.  I know I could.”

My friend said, “Yes, I know.”

When I was at Novell, this happened fairly often.  Employees regularly felt very discouraged, disheartened, and demotivated because of executive management.  I figured that was pretty much just the way companies worked, and that it happened like that everywhere.

Which is why I marveled at this fact, when Jaffe left.  I contemplated how I’d felt that way, and realized that I’ve never once felt that way about my management chain at Microsoft.  On the contrary, I find that I am continually amazed at the level of professionalism, attention to detail, quality of decision-making, and overall caring about the company that I find in my management chain.

I thought perhaps it’s just because I’m new, so I mentioned this to a guy on my team who’s been with Microsoft for over ten years.  He said, “Pretty much, that is how I’ve always felt about my management chain too.”

Novell breaks my heart.  I wanted so badly for Novell to succeed while I was there, and I still want good things for Novell.  I know many great people who work there.  Novell’s problem has never been in the individual contributors; it’s been with the company leadership.

So getting rid of Jaffe can only be a step forward.  It may be too little, too late, but it’s worth a try.