Doubleplusungood Oz

I finished The Oz Principle (no link provided for fear of spreading contagion) in advance of a day long training session on Oz. I am all a-quiver!

This questionable tome seems to be summed up with this gem in its last chapter:

most anything will work if you get Above The Line^® and use your head

Basically, if your efforts are successful you were obviously following the authors principles. If you fail, you fell Below The Dredded Line. In the end they have covered their tails by redefining "GOOD" as "Above The Line" and "BAD" as "Below The Line".

Orwell would be proud.

Wither Wal-Mart

I am pushing through The Oz Principle now. Having endured unending peans to Jack Welch the name dropping has inevitably arrived at Wal-Mart. Every supposed success story drives me to google to see if there is a "rest of the story" and Wal-Mart is no exception. While poking around I came to this chart of Wal-Mart's profitability.

The first thing to notice is how consistent the trend of profit level has been. It is also flat and may be bending downward of late. Do they get kudos for maintaining such consistency over a decade or blame for failing to increase the profitability in any real way? I don't know and don't care.

The figure that struck me was under the chart where it says that Wal-Mart is in the 41st percentile for profitability among all corporations measured, 49th among services companies and 46th among discount, variety stores. Hardly a world beater - just middle of the pack.

Lost in Oz

As I mentioned before, my employer is requiring everyone to read the management book, The Oz Principle. So I have periodically been out on the internets and checking it out. Curiously I can find hardly any negative reviews! I found a couple of 1- and 2-star reviews on Amazon but otherwise, nada. Just to show what kind of guy I am, this makes me very skeptical of the enlightenment value of this tome. Oh, sure, it could be that it is such a superior read that no one would ever have a bad word to say about it. That could happen. Except that I read the first chapter and it blamed the collapse of Enron on a lack of accountability! All that fraud must have been simply a symptom of their failure to live Above the Line^® !

First of all, how can I take seriously someone who registers "Above the Line"?

More to the point, this buzz and lack of critical response indicates that this is probably all hype and management fad. I'll read the stupid book and go to the Zigglaresque training session and then get on with my job. However, I will never be able to escape the nagging knowledge that the men and women running this company think that this codswallop is a great idea...

Update: Changed Trademark to Registered

With a Wimper

The other day I ate lunch with a colleague. She argued that training the entire company on The Oz Principle and having each employee participate in eight two hour evaluations each quarter was worth the expense and bother even if only she and I were inspired to demonstrate responsibility-taking behavior before our co-workers. My position was that not a single management fad I have ever witnessed emerging from the executive suite had had any impact on corporate culture or effectiveness. The Oz Principle walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and, more to the point, smells like a duck. The most disappointing part is that seasoned businessmen and women actually buy these books.

I have made no secret of my doubts about Agile Development. To be sure, my company showed all the signs of an Agile Failure environment - top heavy decision making, Agile by mandate, lack of top-level buy-in, a culture of just-get-by. You can't just flip a switch and change the corporate culture. Now, after only a few months, the course of events is unfolding exactly as I anticipated based on my two decades experience at various companies.

First, at the sprint planning session, the so-called User Stories are written based on the steps required to complete some system design that each developer holds in his or her head. Instead of "As a call center rep, I want ..." every card begins, "As a developer I need to ...". Since our product owner comes out of IT instead of the user organization (she says she KNOWS what they need) no one blinks. When I brought this up, I was told that according to some Agile books, this is allowed. I shut up after that. Next each user story is assigned a complexity based on an unstructured discussion in which the senior members of the team dominate - no input from the underlings. Finally, the programming manager, who is on the team, provides the task estimates and then assigns each task to a developer before the first sprint has even started!

Here's what has happened: the manager nixes any self-organization and the focus remains on IT delivering the functionality that they believe the user needs. To top it off, the higher-ups are demanding hard deadlines and treating every problem as a fire, yanking team members around like manic chess pieces. This process reflects the exact sequence of events that went into planning a project before we went all Agile. As I expected, the members of IT have found a way to do exactly what they were doing before but pay lip service to being Agile. It was that way at the phone company and it's that way now.

The challenge to management is to cancel their Management Book of the Month subscription, do some real research in organizational behavior, look hard at the culture they have to deal with and find creative, insightful ways to move the company out of the 1980's. Good luck.