Office Warfare: Strategies for Getting Ahead in the Aggressive 80’s

Title: Office Warfare: Strategies for Getting Ahead in the Aggressive 80’s

Author: Marilyn Moats Kennedy

Mass Market Paperback

Publisher: Fawcett (October 12, 1986)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0449210162

ISBN-13: 978-0449210161

I wish I’d read this book years ago – it explains a lot about the changes I’ve seen in the workplace over the last 20-plus years.

If you want to know more about office politics, and especially some specific hints on how to not be a victim of them, read this book! I got my copy at a used bookstore, and I’m glad I did. I read it in just a few sittings over three days

The Accidental Investment Banker: Inside the Decade That Transformed Wall Street

Title: The Accidental Investment Banker: Inside the Decade That Transformed Wall Street

Author: Jonathan A. Knee

Paperback: 288 pages

Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks (July 31, 2007)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0812978048

ISBN-13: 978-0812978049

I bought this book at the Phoenix airport on the way home from an interview (I didn’t get the job, bummer).  This book describes the major changes in investment banking from the early 1990s through 2005 from the point of view of a participant, the author.  I liked this book a lot – I didn’t know a lot about investment banking, having only worked for a commercial bank (and they are quite different).  Knee has a nice, direct writing style, and he provides a lot of bootstrapping information so you can understand the events he writes about.

Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics, and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence

Title: Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics, and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence

Author: Tim Parks

Paperback: 288 pages

Publisher: W. W. Norton; 1 edition (May 15, 2006)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0393328457

ISBN-13: 978-0393328455

I read this book while traveling to and from San Diego for an interview.

The book is very interesting – it weaves the historical events of the early Italian Renaissance with the rise and fall of the Medici bank.  Its also interesting to read about how banks can exist when usary is either frowned upon or even illegal (banks in Islamic nations face this issue all the time).  The Florentine banks funded trade, and so made money on the sales of goods abroad instead of directly by interest.

Worth a read if you’re interested in the Renaissance or in the history of banking.

Enterprise Architecture As Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution

Title: Enterprise Architecture As Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution
Author: Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weill, David Robertson
Hardcover: 234 pages
Publisher: Harvard Business School Press (August 8, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1591398398
ISBN-13: 978-159139839

This is a great book once you have some knowledge of what architecture and strategy are. I think a number of the figures and some of the text will be useful in describing what should be done to use architecture to align strategies, and also may point to some measurements that would be useful to tell if you’re on the right track.First up are the elements you need to create and exploit a foundation for execution, which includes strategy and architecture.

The book follows with four operating models; selecting an overall operating model for the organization, along with perhaps other models for parts of the company, is needed to determine what materials are needed for a successful enterprise architecture, and how governance of the architecture should be handled.

The operating models foster different types of growth opportunities.

As the architecture (and strategy) matures, flexibility changes. We often talk about agility in organizations; the goal of
an organization with strong strategy and architecture will likely be organizational agility, which is the ability of the organization as a whole to change direction.

Below is a survey of corporations indicating which enterprise architecture practices were in place.

The last figure I’ve copied here is how management practices evolve along the architecture stages.

The Business Guide to Legal Literacy : What Every Manager Should Know About the Law

Title: The Business Guide to Legal Literacy : What Every Manager Should Know About the Law
Author: Hanna Hasl-Kelchner
Hardcover: 384 pages
Publisher: Jossey-Bass (March 31, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN: 078798255

I won this book on http://inbubblewrap.com/ , which is a great web site (its a give-away site for 800ceoread.com, which is a great on-line bookstore for business books).

This book was quick and easy to read and full of useful materials. I also think that understanding legal risk is not common in the business world – we tend to learn the lessons either when senior management complains that a contract wasn’t reviewed well or that there’s a liability or patent risk in what’s going on – this is because they’ve seen it before, often from their senior management years ago.

One important message I’ve been delivering lately is to limit negligence; if we do what’s common in the industry, and if we consider our options rationally, then we may still be liable but not negligent, and negligence can ramp up the cost for legal problems greatly. In addition, such due dilligence is a good thing normally, as long as its not taken to extreme. The goal is to manage the legal risk within the risk that’s reasonable for the organization and in this case.

Hasl-Kelchner mentions the concept of mindfulness of organizations, based on research from Managing the Unexpected by Weick and Sutcliffe; generally speaking, the these organizations were:

• “More preoccupied with failures than with successes. They appreciated that achieving strategic goals is as much about knowing what mistakes to avoid as it is about knowing what you want to achieve.
• Reluctant to oversimplify. They preferred to reconcile interdisciplinary perspectives without sacrificing important nuances.
• Sensitive to operations and relationships within the value chain. They were particularly alert to the risk associated with latent failures.
• Committed to resilience. They bounced back from past errors by learning from past mistakes and developing knowledge.
• Deferential to expertise.”

The book makes a strong case for helping attorneys understand the risks a business accepts in general, and also in how to communicate risks back to the business. Business is all about accepting some forms of risk, but lawyers typically try to minimize risks.

I liked this simple quadrant approach to looking at risk based on reason to take action vs. the merits of a case. It is possible, and a goal, to move items from higher risks to lower risks – the book suggests approaches that have worked in the past to do this.

This diagram shows a “formula” for calculating the possible negative impact on a business of a legal action.

As an aside, this book as some really interesting items related to communication – this isn’t surprising, since communication is a big aspect of gaining literacy in almost anything. Below is a table showing communications channels and their strengths and weaknesses:

Later on in the book, there’s a discussion about communication attributes that are important to affecting legal
literacy:“Expanding employees’ safety zones requires steering clear of misunderstandings and creating a community of joint interest. Special attention must be paid to the elements of communication-the who, what, when, where, why, and how. Applying these elements to our goal of improved legal literacy, compliance, and leverage means looking
at points like these:

• Who communicates: Are they credible? Do they have authority? Do they know what they are talking about?What is being said: Is it consistent? Is it appropriate? Is it serious?
• When it is being said: How often is the message sent? Is the timing appropriate? Why now?
• Where it is being said: Is it being whispered in the hallway? Or posted on the company intranet?
• Why it is being said: What’s really going on? What are the consequences for the employees? Is there a hidden agenda?
• How it is being said: Does the message make sense? Can it be taken at face value or is there more between the lines? Is it likely to be misinterpreted and misunderstood? How loud is the message? What kind of resources are behind it?

“Another way to vet corporate communications is to evaluate them on the basis of whether they are constant, clear,
consistent, correct, and
convincing:

• Constant: Is the message repeated often enough?
• Clear: Is the message understandable?
• Consistent: Do different editions of the message agree with one another?
• Correct: Is it the right message? Right time? Right place? Can the audience understand it?
• Convincing: Is the messenger credible? Is the content persuasive? Is the timing correct? What resources are being devoted to it? How important is it?”

Managing IT as a Business: a Survival Guide for CEOs

Title: Managing IT as a Business: a Survival Guide for CEOs
Author: Mark D. Lutchen
Hardcover: 256 pages
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons (October 3, 2003)
Language: English
ISBN: 047147104

This book is a good overview of things a CIO should consider to make the CEO’s, and the company’s, life easier. I scanned three images from the book to save because they felt important.

These are example business value measures for IT given a type of technology investment.

This diagram indicates what audience should be interested in which set of metrics.
Lastly, this diagram shows how standards work.

Its interesting that all these diagrams show up at the end of the book; this book definitely builds from small beginnings to big conclusions. It also stresses the importance of understanding where the money goes (IT spend), which is hard at most large companies, and then ways to manage that spend to provide value. It also shows that the position of
the CIO has moved from a technology position to a business position.

Seeing What’s Next: Using the Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change

Title: Seeing What’s Next: Using the Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change
Author: Clayton M. Christensen, Scott D. Anthony, Erik A. Roth
Hardcover: 312 pages
Publisher: Harvard Business School Press (May 1, 2004)
Language: English
ISBN: 159139185

This book is written by the guy that wrote The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution. The book takes a case study approach to mapping ideas from The Innovator’s Dilemma onto the growth and disruption of industries. Specific suggestions are made for ways to identify and deal with disruptive and non-disruptive change. Below are a couple of figures I found interesting from this book.

Human Error

Title: Human Error
Author: James Reason
Paperback: 316 pages
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (October 26, 1990)
Language: English
ISBN: 052131419

Overview

This book is very academic, but does have useful information about the reasons people make mistakes and how to categorize them. This kind of information is crucial for understanding how to make software more survivable “in the wild.” To understand the following tables and diagrams, you need to understand a little about GEMS, the Generic Error-Modeling System. Reason separates errors into three categories:

• Skill-Based Errors (SB)
• Rule-Based Errors (RB)
• Knowledge-Based Errors (KB)

Distinctions between error types²

DIMENSION	SKILL-BASED (SB) ERRORS	RULE-BASED (RB) ERRORS	KNOWLEDGE-BASED (KB) ERRORS
TYPE OF ACTIVITY	Routine actions	Problem-solving activities
FOCUS OF ATTENTION	On something other than the task in hand	Directed at problem-related issues
CONTROL MODE	Mainly by automatic processors		Limited, conscious processes
PREDICTABILITY OF ERROR TYPES	Largely predictable “strong-but-wrong” errors		Variable
RATIO OF ERROR TO OPPORTUNITY FOR ERROR	Though absolute numbers may be high, these constitute a small proportion of the total number of opportunities for error		Absolute numbers small, but opportunity ratio high
INFLUENCE OF SITUATIONAL FACTORS	Low to moderate; intrinsic factors (frequency of prior use) likely to exert the dominant influence		Extrinsic factors likely to dominate
EASE OF DETECTION	Detection usually fairly rapid and effective	Difficult, and often only achieved through external intervention
RELATIONSHIP TO CHANGE	Knowledge of change not assessed at proper time	When and how anticipated change will occur unknown	Changes not prepared for or anticipated

The dynamics of the generic error-modeling system (GEMS)³

Failure modes at each performance level⁴

Skill-Based (SB) Performance

Inattention	Overattention
Double-capture slips	Omissions
Omissions following interruptions	Repetitions
Reduced intentionality	Reversals
Perceptual confusions
Interference errors

Rule-Based (RB) Performance

Misapplication of good rules	Application of bad rules
First exceptions	Encoding deficiencies
Countersigns and nonsigns	Action deficiencies
Informational overload	Wrong rules
Rule strength	Inelegant rules
General rules	Inadvisable rules
Redundancy
Rigidity

Knowledge-Based (KB) Performance

Selectivity

Workspace limitations

Out of sight out of mind

Confirmation bias

Overconfidence

Biased reviewing

Illusory correlation

Halo effects

Problems with causality

Problems with complexity

Problems with delayed feed-back

Insufficient consideration of processes in time

Difficulties with exponential developments

Thinking in causal series not causal nets

Thematic vagabonding

Encysting

Footnotes

¹ All footnotes and quotations that are not otherwise
attributed are from:

Human Error, James Reason, Cambridge University Press, New
York, 1990

² p. 62
³ p.64
⁴ p.69

Under Pressure and On Time

Title: Under Pressure and On Time
Author: Ed Sullivan
Paperback: 304 pages
Publisher: Microsoft Press; 1 edition (April 4, 2001)
Language: English
ISBN: 073561184

Under defining requirements (p. 143), Ed suggests defining general requirements and then more and more specific sub-requirements. Then, on p. 150, Ed draws a rectangle for categorizing requirements (pp. 148 ­ 151)

A go-ahead requirement puts your product ahead of your competitors in the marketplace. A catch-up requirement brings your features in line with those of your competitors.

Backward-looking requirements address issues or problems with previous releases of the software. Forward-looking requirements anticipate the future needs of the customer.

Quadrant 1: You are anticipating future needs and will be the first vendor to provide a solution. These needs might not be well understood or estabhshed; you are breaking new ground, so your risk level is quite high. Because there are so many unknowns, you woet be able to provide a lot of up-front definition. You’ll need to place an emphasis on iterative prototyping. You will need to iterate your designs very quickly, employ real users to test them, and update your requirements before entering a scheduling stage.

Quadrant 2: Your competitors have a set of features that anticipate customer needs and you want to catch up with them. Research their offering, understand what they did right and what they did wrong, and exploit their mistakes. Your risks should be less in this quadrant than they are in quadrant 1 because there is already an existing product to learn from. However, market and customer needs are likely to be changing rapidly, and you’ll need to perform a lot of prototyping of usability and technical designs before formalizing the requirements and establishing a schedule.

Quadrant 3: This just might be one of the best to find yourself indelivering a set of features that will be unique in the industry without the risk of incorrectly anticipating market trends. Because you are working with a well known or established customers, the risks for this type of release are usually associated with correct feature implementation and timely delivery rather than technology innovation.

Quadrant 4: In this tactical release, you’re adding features to a product that your competitor already has shipped. The risk for this release should be relatively small because you are working on features and technology that should already be understood for a market that has already been established. Because this type of release has so little risk, it should not require as much usability testing and prototyping iteration as the others.

Remember, the goal of this exercise is to make sure your requirements will have the commercial impact you desire. Although it’s possible to have a set of requirements that are equally divided among the four quadrants, that is generally not advisable, because you could end up with a release that is lacking a clear vision or focus. It is far better to have the majority of your requirements in one quadrant and supported by fewer requirements in one or two other quadrants.

On research, Ed suggests focusing on the following categories (p. 162):

Market trends and advances: Every three or four years, the market introduces new technological advances. Whether they relate to graphical user interfaces, client/ server development, component object models, or the Internet, you must stay abreast of these fundamental changes and not be left behind as major changes are taking place. Use your research effort to look for, understand, and track major market moves. Don’t get so lost in your own effort that you ignore the greater context around you.

New ideas: New product or technological ideas can come at any time and from anywhere. Sometimes they come from internal sources and other times they come from external ones. Some could be worth millions of dollars and others could be a big waste of time. Your research effort should be skilled at taking these new ideas and quickly separating the good ones from the bad ones.

Competitor innovations and directions: One of the most important areas to focus research on is that of competitor innovations and directions. You need to understand your competitors’ technology, strengths, and weaknesses to compete against them successfully.

When considering a new change, Ed suggests asking the following questions (p. 215):

• How much revenue will I lose if I don’t do it?
  
• How many customers will benefit from this change?
  
• Will I miss or put my ship date at risk if I do it?
  
• Will I be at a competitive disadvantage if I don’t do it?
  
• How much risk will I introduce to the product’s quality if I do it?
  
• What is the impact on the usability, the documentation or the build and install procedures?

Crossing the Chasm

Title: Crossing the Chasm
Author: Geoffrey A Moore
Softcover: 256 Pages
Publisher: HarperBusiness; Revised edition (August, 2002)
ISBN: 006051712

I keep coming back to this book whenever I need to build a product or new service; between this book, Under Pressure and On Time and The Innovator’s Dilemma, you have a good beginning marketing reading list. The following image comes from p. 17 of the book:

Mr. Moore describes these groups of customers/clients clearly, so I quote from p. 12 – 13 of his book:

“Innovators pursue new technology products aggressively. They sometimes seek them out even before a formal marketing program has been launched. This is because technology is a central interest in their life, regardless of what fimction it is performing. At root they are intrigued with any fundamental advance and often make a technology purchase simply for the pleasure of exploring the new device’s properties. There are not very many innovators in any given market segment, but winning them over at the outset of a marketing campaign is key nonetheless, because their
endorsement reassures the other players in the marketplace does in fact work.

“Early adopters, like innovators, buy into new product concepts very early in their life cycle, but unlike innovators, they are not technologists. Rather they are people who find it easy to imagine, understand, and appreciate the benefits of a new technology, and to relate these potential benefits to their other concerns. Whenever they find a strong match, early adopters are willing to base their buying decisions upon it. Because early adopters do not rely on well-established references in making these buying decisions, preferring instead to rely on their own intuition and
vision, they are key to opening up any high-tech market segment.

“The early majority share some of the early adoptees ability to relate to technology, but ultimately they are driven by a strong sense of practicality. They know that many of these newfangled inventions end up as passing fads, so they are content to wait and see how other people are making out before they buy in themselves. They want to see well-established references before investing substantially. Because there are so many people in this segment – roughly one-third of the whole adoption life cycle – winning their business is key to any substantial profits and growth.

“The late majority shares all the concerns of the early majority, plus one major additional one: Whereas people in the early majority are comfortable with their ability to handle a technology product, should they finally decide to purchase it, members of the late majority are not. As a result, they wait until something has become an established standard, and even then they want to see lots of support and tend to buy, therefore, from large, well-established companies. Like the early majority, this group comprises about one-third of the total buying population in any given segment. Courting its favor is highly profitable indeed, for while profit margins decrease as the products mature, so do the selling costs, and virtually all the R&D costs have been amortized.

“Finally there are the laggards. These people simply don’t want anything to do with new technology, for any of a variety of reasons, some personal and some economic. The only time they ever buy a technological product is when it is buried so deep inside another product – the way, say, that a microprocessor is designed into the braking system of a new car – that they don’t even know it is there. Laggards are generally regarded as not worth pursuing on any other basis.

“To recap the logic of the Technology Adoption Life Cycle, its underlying thesis is that technology is absorbed into any given community in stages corresponding to the psychological and social profiles of various segments within that community. This process can be thought of as a continuum with definable stages, each associated with a definable group, and each group making up a predictable portion of the whole.”

I return to this over and over again:

“….Our focus should be on the minimum commitment to whole product needed to
cross the chasm.” (p. 113) The big goal here is to figure out what makes this
product compelling to buy, and then finding the fastest, cheapest way to get
those additions surrounding the core product. For example, if you need to do a
new program, consider what you need to go along with the program to make it
complete. Did you consider training? How about consulting help to get things
rolling? How will marketing work? Thinking along these lines helps turn a raw
product into a complete product ready for the early majority (ready to try to
cross the chasm).”

The following diagram is from p. 135:

This diagram shows how the focus of the client changes as we move our product along the Technology Adoption LifeCycle. The focus of a company needs to change as a product moves along its lifecycle – this is often why the people that start a long-term (crosses the chasm), successful company are rarely there when it finally goes away.

On page 150, Mr. Moore suggests four aspects of product positioning:

1. Name it and frame it
2. Who for and what for
3. Competition and differentiation
4. Financials and futures

Each develops as we move along the product lifecycle. Moore provides some help with suggestions of things to consider in each of the areas:

This diagram is from p. 157.