Peter Principle: "Every new member in a hierarchical organization climbs the hierarchy until he/she reaches his/her level of maximum incompetence." [try here for more]
IT IS PARADOXICAL, SOUNDS UNREASONABLE, AND DEFIES COMMON-SENSE. But that is how it works, realistically and evidently, for any hierarchical organization where the way of promotion rewards the best members and where the competence at their new level in the hierarchical structure does not depend on the competence they had at the previous level, usually because the tasks of the levels are very different between each other. Since about 50 years ago when a Canadian psychologist named Laurence J. Peter published his studies to this effect in 1969, there has been many changes in the way organizations and it workforce operate in relation with each other. There has been multiple experimental models across various industries, including Role-based organization, Competency-based designations, (A fusion of sorts of these two), flat-structures, circular organizations, and alike. Peter principle seem to have remained steadfast among all of these nonetheless.
In their study published a few days ago on Organization Efficiency titled "The Peter Principle Revisited" Prof Alessandro Pluchino and two other colleagues of the Universita di Catania of Italy argue that the long term consequence of Peter principle seems to imply an unavoidable spreading of the incompetence over all the organization and would be in danger of causing a collapse in its efficiency. The team presents a numerical study of Peter principle (arguably for the first time) which they presented as "agent based model" of managing organization efficiency.
[Above: Agent Based Model -- The computational study of the Peter principle process applied to a prototypical organization with pyramidal hierarchical structure having 160 positions across 6 levels. On a lighter note, a colleague recently came up with his idea on the progression within the pyramid structure that the "lighter" the person in terms of work-load, the "higher" she floats towards the top of the pyramid.]
The "Common Sense strategy" is to promote the most efficient person up the hierarchy. However, the study argues that the best strategies to improve, or at least not to diminish, the efficiency of an organization, when one ignores the actual way of competence transmission, are those of promoting an agent at random or of randomly alternating the promotion of the best and the worst members.
Providing alternatives to the CS approach for promotions, the study illustrates two alternative strategies inspired by Peter Hypothesis wherein either a random person is promoted (incidental, which is also in line with Game-theory), or the best and the worst persons are promoted alternatively.
Mushroom Management Theory: Keep employees in the dark and fearful, feed them manure and dung, watch them grow and when they grow enough, get them canned. (try here for more at urban dictionary)
IN QUITE A CONTRAST TO THE PREVIOUS post, this is not only a different type of leadership, it is found being practices widely as well. Referencing their publication for this month (June 2009), John Landry of Harvard Business Review writes that Lehman would not have happened if they would have allowed a freer flow of information, or made it easier for employees to raise their concerns. Industry observers have drawn parallels of Lehman explosion with implosions of Enron and WorldCom citing the same "keeping in dark" issues where information is not shared.
But before that, a brief 'story':
Tom is the leader of the designing team for a computer company, who is working on a plan B in case the main project fails. Eventually, the main plan fails and the backup plan –code-named "Eagle" – becomes the company's only hope in catching up with the competition. Tom has a bunch of college freshers as the team, who have never designed anything in their life before. On the other hand, Tom has to grapple with new technology and tools to work with and for which he has no skill-set at hand.
Under pressure, his boss Edson and Tom employs Mushroom Management.
But finally, the "Soul" of the new design comes from the dedicated engineers who bring it to "life" with their endless hours of dedication, attention and toil.
This story is a reality. This is the central plot of The Soul of a New Machine – a non-fiction book by Tracy Kidder that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981 – one of the highest accords in contemporary literature. This true story talks about Data General Corporation (now a part of EMC corp) for which Tom West and Edson deCastro worked. And where they competed with DEC and VAX range of minicomputer systems (try here for a picture of Eagle/MV8000 minicomputer prototype. The market, however, was finally won a few years later by IBM with microcomputers, simply known today as a PC of the 21th century [or a Mac, for the Apple cult]).
James O'Toole and Warren Bennis, authors of the HBR research paper – What’s Needed Next: A Culture of Candor – examines the case and blames such mushroom management practices to the all-too-human insecurities on the part of the managers and management (try here). Their focus is on the big picture. After analysing, they urge the managers to lead the way by being as honest as possible, admitting mistakes, exhorting people to speak truth to power, and working at having difficult conversations with employees.
Following is an excerpt from their article – NASA's findings on the human factors involved in airline accidents:
"...the lesson of the NASA findings is simple: Leaders are far likelier to make mistakes when they act on too little information than when they wait to learn more. [the research demonstrated] that the pilots’ habitual style of interacting with their crews determined whether crew members would provide them with essential information during an in-air crisis. The pilots who’d made the right choices routinely had open exchanges with their crew members. The study also showed that crew members who had regularly worked with the “decisive” pilots were unwilling to intervene—even when they had information that might save the plane...”
Americanism means the virtues of courage, honor, justice, truth, sincerity, and hardihood; the virtues that made America. The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life. -- Theodore Roosevelt
NR NARAYANA MURTHY OF INFOSYS delivered the opening lecture at Columbia Business School's Khemka Distinguished Speaker Forum at Manhattan on May 26, 2009, where the above quote from Roosevelt were the closing lines.
Mr. Murthy began by describing Capitalism as an economic system in which investment in and ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange of wealth is made possible and is maintained chiefly by the private individuals or corporations. It is a system that incentivises individuals to use their enterprise, drive, hard-work and innovation to create wealth for themselves and the society.
Mr. Murthy argued that capitalism is also a system most conducive of creation of jobs and elimination of poverty and no other social or political system has succeeded as much as capitalism in benefiting the society at large. Providing his reactions on the issue of things going wrong with capitalism in recent months - especially the disproportional funds and bonuses claimed by executives of organizations going bankrupt, billions worth of fraud funds, and leaders cooking up accounting books - Mr. Murthy, who was declared by The Economist in 2005 as one of the top 10 most admired global business leaders, called for looking inward and for cultivating better ethical qualities to become a respectable leader. Following are the eight of them as he recounts.
Percepts of being a Respectable Leader:
1. Create a good culture around you: Decent behaviour stems from a good culture surrounding a person. It is required to have the culture of openness, fairness, honesty, decency, transparency and accountability in a corporation. This task has to start from day one, and can not wait till you become a CEO.
2. Cultivate simple and inexpensive habits: The best way to overcoming greed is to derive pleasure and spend time on small, simple and inexpensive habits in life. Every decent town has a modest library. And, the government (still) does not tax having a good conversation.
3. Do not equate success with money and power: Success is your acceptance by the circle of you family, friends, your officemates, and your community that you are indeed valuable. Success is also about having good sleep every night.
4. Create an environment of happiness around you: A happy leader has a circle of supportive family and friends. Building such a circle requires a lot of emotional investment on your part. I do not know of anybody who is a demon at his office and an angel at home.
5. Don't get fixated on extreme desires: Desire is the root cause of all sorrows, said the Buddha. Extreme fixation with material things leads to greed, fraud and acts that we would later regret.
6. Shun jealousy: Jealousy is a rationalization of your failure vis-a-vis another's success or achievements.
7. Maintain transparency and develop a sense of humility: When in doubt, disclose (with your family, friends and at workplace). Humility is admitting that there could be other people better than me, and helps cultivate team-spirit.
8. Take part in charitable activities in your spare time: The opportunity of meeting other generous people outside the hierarchy of your organization is a sure way of escaping the orbit of jealousy.
[Above: NR Narayan Murthy delivering speech at Columbia. Go here at YouTube.]
See also:
Go here for the related article on Columbia website.
Go here for more on Mr. Murthy on the official Infosys website.
Beautiful Data: The Stories Behind Elegant Data Solutions by Toby Segaran and Jeff Hammerbacher (try here) Looking forward to his book which is due in July 2009.
The 39 contributors of the book explain how they developed simple and elegant solutions on projects ranging from the Mars lander to a Radiohead video.
Some of the topics include:
opportunities and challenges of datasets on the Web
visualize trends in urban crime using maps and data mashups
challenges of data processing system of space travel
crowdsourcing and transparency helps drug research
automatic alerts when new data overlaps pre-existing data
massive investment to create, capture, and process DNA data
The Passionate Programmer: Creating a Remarkable Career in Software Development by Chad Fowler (try here)
Chad Fowler argues here that your career in Software has to be a personal enterprise. And this publication from Pragmatic Bookshelf is one of my picks for the new engineers joining the Software industry, and who come for advice (and expects me to fortune tell for them :-)
This book is about creating a remarkable career in software development. In most cases, remarkable careers don't come by chance. They require thought, intention, action, and a willingness to change course when you've made mistakes. Most of us (including me to a larger part, and most of those that I know personally) have been stumbling around letting our careers take us where they may. While the uncertainty is not entirely avoidable, Fowler argues that it can be controlled, and this book aims to lay out a strategy for planning a possible successful life in software development.
Success in today's IT environment requires you to view your career as a business endeavour. This book tries to teach how to become an entrepreneur, driving your career in the direction of your choosing. Fowler talks about building your software development career step by step, following the same path that you would follow if you were building, marketing, and selling a product. After all, your skills themselves are a product.
This is a Slow Blog about, among other things, thinking and perspectives of contemporary life; which, I believe, on the vertical pole is driven by Psychology and Economics (Psycho-economy), and is pivoted by Analysis and Intuition (Intu-nalysis) on the horizontal axis.
Writing this is an IT consultant who was on a high with Investment Banking, until the layoffs... Like any auto-critique I read my writings and revise them, for communication is something that can be improvised upon, continuously.
Views and ideas expressed here are strictly personal. And if you like what you get here, you are free to reuse them by respecting this Creative Commons licensing.
Posts
