Management by Flying Around

Being up at 4:30 am and a long drive to Portland gave me a chance to reflect on a problem I've been mulling for a while now.

For decades, thinking about business and management has been driven by sports and military analogies and experiences. The post-war generation that built the United States into the world's largest economy brought practices and organizational structures from their military experiences. Even within technology we are not immune to this. When I first saw Scrum, an "agile" method for developing software, my immediate reaction was "This is exactly like the Romans structured their military command, 2000 years ago!" We intuitively understand command-control management, work in "teams," "quarterback" meetings, and of course what executive doesn't play golf?

J9's consultants are located all across the United States - I've never met in person some of the people I work closely with, and others I see in person only rarely. The tactics commonly deployed and many of the management techniques of the past quickly fall apart when you don't have the proverbial water-cooler. The inter-personal issues -- health, relationships, personal interests -- become difficult to track and yet plenty of research has shown management empathy to personal needs as a significant factor in employee retention and job satisfaction. Career planning and reviews, especially when criticism needs to be levied, are lost when timezones and thousands of miles separate your staff.

It isn't simply a problem in personnel management either. I recall vividly the first time I saw a Gantt chart, at age 13. Those colorful bars and perfectly placed diamond milestones sparkled with their organizational efficiency. Perfection, yet completely useless if your project consists of loosely related tasks without strict dependencies, especially one where the personnel ebb and flow in and out of the project. Installing a piece of software -- there's something you can put on a gantt chart. Whether the customer has successfully developed the skills to support the software? A less well-defined task.

So here comes the summary: Companies are ever more virtualized, global, and 24x7, and it isn't just the largest companies and in the executive office that these demands appear. The management practices of the past, with their roots in industrialism, simply aren't working. I don't yet know what the answer is, but change is imminent.