The no excuses culture

https://steveblank.com/2017/03/08/the-no-excuses-culture/

by furkansahin • 9 years ago

168 164 9 years ago

coding123• 9 years ago

This story being about a marketing department might seem like it's not applicable to a software company, but when it comes down to it, we still break down our work into bite-sized stories that can/should be accomplished in a timeframe that's estimated ahead of time. Some shops have more nebulous tasks because they've never done something before, I get that. But for the build the thing we know how to stuff? We should be able to deliver consistently. It comes down to your ability to break down the work into small enough pieces such that you know how long it will take. If you don't know how long it will take, it's not broken down enough.

Now to play devils advocate - I'm generally in favor of carrot not stick.

SomeStupidPoint• 9 years ago

Could you elaborate what you mean by your last line?

I think firing someone for it once is on the harsh side, but if someone repeatedly doesn't share key information, how can you keep working with them?

Sorreah3• 9 years ago

I believe this just isn't possible for a whole lot of projects. Codebases tend to grow so large, and people tend to come and go, so people don't really know most parts of the code, so then a lot of the time estimates are inaccurate to the point of being useless.

BuuQu9hu• 9 years ago

"Excuses are the nails used to build the house of failure," or so the saying goes. A teacher used to repeat this phrase to any grade-school students who failed to turn in homework. He didn't care what the excuses were; no amount of excuse can undo the passage of time and the truancy of students.

The bulk of the post is about compensating for the lack of excuses with compassion and teamwork, and avoiding creating a culture of blame. This is important. Excuses hide accountability, but blame makes communication impossible.

k__• 9 years ago

Never did my homework.

I'd rather stayed at school an hour longer than doing homework in the afternoon.

Lowered my grade in every class, but my free time was totally worth it.

In the end I still got to study computer science, like I always wanted, so I don't see their point in retrospect...

draw_down2• 9 years ago

Same here.

nullspace• 9 years ago

I feel a little skeptical. One of the hardest and important parts of management is maintaining trust between you and your team. It's very easy to communicate something in a way that's misunderstood, and kills the morale. What then happens is that few people leave, and overall productivity of your organization plunges.

Note that he spent about a third of the post explaining `I didn’t mean “deliver or else.”`. It's an indication that it's hard to pull off.

I have no opinion on this this strategy as such (i.e. I think it sounds pretty good), but please don't try this in your org unless you are very experienced, and feel confident that you can communicate it well.

GuiA2• 9 years ago

"[Steve] Jobs imagines his garbage regularly not being emptied in his office, and when he asks the janitor why, he gets an excuse: The locks have been changed, and the janitor doesn't have a key. This is an acceptable excuse coming from someone who empties trash bins for a living. The janitor gets to explain why something went wrong. Senior people do not. "When you're the janitor," Jobs has repeatedly told incoming VPs, "reasons matter." He continues: "Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering." That "Rubicon," he has said, "is crossed when you become a VP."

https://www.macstories.net/news/inside-apple-reveals-steve-j...

kristianc4• 9 years ago

I'm quite relieved that the trend for 'Steve Jobs was an asshole; therefore to succeed I need to be an asshole' line of management thinking is now dying out.

derefr5• 9 years ago

I've heard this from a lot of business-management types, but I've always felt they have the causality backwards.

It's not that "reasons don't matter", so therefore you can know your job is now in the executive suite.

It's rather that once you're an executive, you are (presumably) granted enough power and authority to actually fix problems on your own initiative, before they become visible to the people above you. So if a problem becomes visible to the people above you, it means you didn't exercise all that power and authority at your disposal to prevent that.

I think this causal direction is more useful, because it suggests that there sometimes still are "reasons" that can matter as justifications for failure—as long as those "reasons" are things outside of the reach of the executive's power+authority. For example, a COO won't usually be fired if an political/military emergency grounds all flights and so nobody's stuff gets delivered—because there's nothing they really could have done about that, no amount of planning that would have circumlocuted the problem.

Mz7• 9 years ago

No, I think the OP is correct.

My father and ex husband were career military and I was a full time mom. Both the military and parenting have this in common: You may not be in control of certain things, nonetheless, you are responsible for the outcome.

In other words, kids are autonomous beings and may do things the parent does not want them to do. When the law says money is owed due to the child breaking something, they come after the parents. In the military, if you are in charge, you take the fall when things go wrong, even if it wasn't your fault.

The world gives us endless obstacles between us and our goals. If you want to make excuses, there is never any shortage of them to be found. But if you want a thing to happen, at some point, you just have to decide that "The buck stops here" and not accept excuses.

GuiA2• 9 years ago

no amount of planning that would have circumlocuted the problem.

You mean "circumvent".

Circumlocution (also called circumduction, circumvolution, periphrasis, or ambage) is locution that circles around a specific idea with multiple words rather than directly evoking it with fewer and apter words.

ForHackernews• 9 years ago

This isn't really true at all. CEOs give excuses in their earnings reports all the time ('economic headwinds', 'unfavorable regulatory climate', 'manufacturing complications'). Sometimes investors will punish the share price, but only rarely does the board consequently penalize the executives, and only in cases of really severe screwups.

kristianc4• 9 years ago

Quite. More often it's a case of 'You really fucked this up. Here, have a $1.94m bonus.'

valuearb10• 9 years ago

More good arguments for A No Excuses culture.

icebraining2• 9 years ago

Funny, coming from Steve "you're-holding-it-wrong" Jobs.

vvanders• 9 years ago

Sounds very similar to one of my old bosses. He had one rule and one only: no surprises.

Soon as anything is a potential issue raise it, find a mitigation and move on. Simple and works surprisingly well both on an individual basis and at scale.

_m8fo• 9 years ago

As usual with business people, the author seems to believe their [simplified strategy] (no excuses) is what caused the outcome they describe. I think it's more likely from the article that the organization simply became more efficient as a result of said "no excuses culture", but it isn't actually the lack of excuses that did much. Why isn't it OK to just say "it's complicated; here's what we did" instead of trying to reduce it into some meaningless phrase.

I think this pretty much says it:

By accountable I meant, “We agreed on a delivery date, and between now and the delivery date, it’s OK if you ask for help because you’re stuck, or something happened outside of your control. But do not walk into my office the day something is due and give me an excuse. It will cost you your job.” That kind of accountable.

---

What's an excuse? Most dictionaries define it as some variant of "justifying" an event. Some editorialize and use words such as: apologizing for, or making light of. Let's just take the essence, justification.

Therefore, a "no excuses culture" is a culture in which there's no justification for events. Such a culture will likely fail in the long run as it fails to acknowledge the blind spot it's purposely ignoring. I doubt any business people would be proud of not knowing why they're missing targets...

watwut10• 9 years ago

I think that successs had nothing to do with excuses and a lot more to do with "my groups inside of marketing had become dumping grounds for projects from both inside and outside of marketing – with everything being “priority one.” [...] We quickly put in a capacity/priority planning process."

I bet a hat that it was primary the prioritization and planning process that did the trick.

SerLava4• 9 years ago

Yeah, he rallied around the "no excuses" mantra because it felt good. And sure enough, halfway down the page he says the department dramatically reduced the amount of work intake.

Gee.

It seems like most of the excuses could be boiled down to "Well, you told me to complete a project, but then later you told me not to complete it, so I didn't."

valuearb10• 9 years ago

I bet it wouldn't have been fixed without the ultimatum.

watwut10• 9 years ago

It seems that original problem was that importance of deadlines was not communicated to the team. For example: "the January ad had to be moved into February because my graphic artist was sick, but I didn’t tell you because I assumed it was OK." does not sound like an excuse to me. It sounds like the person genuinely did not seen the event as important and may be surprised over this being big deal suddenly.

It sounds to me that previous management did not valued deadlines and did not even made deadlines possible, so naturally employees did things previous management valued.

lillesvin• 9 years ago

I've tried to stick to "no excuses" ever since I watched Rising Sun in the mid '90es. When Wesley Snipes' character is late he starts making excuses to Sean Connery's character who promptly tells him to stop making excuses and "don't be late". It's not a very prominent quote from the movie or anything, but for some reason it just resonated with me. Perhaps because I tended to make a lot of excuses.

rdlecler1• 9 years ago

This is an example of a dangerous one-size-fits-all silver bullet philosophy

First, this creates selection for a culture that punches below its weight. Never willing to stetch itself. Underperformers apply here.

Second, this is fine when you don't have external dependencies who you can't simply fire. You may have to work at the speed of an organization that doesn't share these values and this becomes the rate limiting step to your growth.

Third, if your company is a rocketship and you have a lot of leverage over your employees, you may be able to pull this, but in practice you're going to have to pick your battles. Failure to create a safe work environment can erode trust and make for a toxic and fearful workplace.

UweSchmidt• 9 years ago

It is as if running a company was a new thing and people have to figure it out in 2017 without any kind of reference point.

mindcrime6• 9 years ago

Failure to create a safe work environment can erode trust and make for a toxic and fearful workplace.

Having a safe work environment isn't the same thing as not holding people accountable.

sprafa2• 9 years ago

No of course not. The whole problem that Steve is talking about here stinks of mismanagement of some sort tho, that isn't really fixed by telling people "stop giving me excuses on delivery day". Something is wrong with the whole organization, but he isn't able to figure it out, so he's telling people to put up or shut up. He's attacking the symptom, not the cause.

Read on the Toyota Production System for alternative solutions.

randomdrake• 9 years ago

This was a good post and an interesting idea with some nice conclusions.

One of the commenters, however, nailed it and got to the heart of the difficulty: getting people to do what they say they will do. Period. Full stop.

You can wrap excuses, or culture, or other corporate vocabulary around the matter, but it boils down to that fundamental thing of people doing what they are asked and delivering what they say they will.

Managing people is difficult and if there's an organization who has had more experience organizing people to execute objectives than most anyone else, it's the military. They are damned good at it and there exists a lot of manuals and writings to this end.

The commentor brought up an essay from 1899 that is still brought up in today's military training. It is clearer and more to the point of the fundamental need of people who can do what you ask and deliver what they say.

It's only three pages and it's wonderful. A Message to Garcia by Elbert Hubbard:

http://www.benning.army.mil/infantry/199th/ocs/content/pdf/m...

There's an extraordinary amount of laziness and entitlement in today's businesses; technology is no exception. It is truly rarer and rarer to find someone who will simply: "carry a message to Garcia."

SerLava4• 9 years ago

The man who just "carried the message to Garcia" actually had autonomy and trust. When the President heard of the delivery, he didn't ask if Rowan followed the previously established ruleset for message delivery.

Petulant, undetermined people do exist in subordinate roles. However, oftentimes managers put up barriers but then weep and moan into their hands - why oh why can't my job be to sit and ask for things to be completed?

jodrellblank• 9 years ago

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/00/86/b4/0086b4581...

No man, who has endeavored to carry out a coursework where many hands were needed, but has been well-nigh appalled at times by the imbecility of the average girl - the inability or unwillingness to concentrate on a thing and do it.

Slipshod assistance, foolish inattention, dowdy indifference, and half-hearted work seem the rule; and no man succeeds, unless by hook or crook, or threat, he forces or bribes other men to assist him; or mayhap, God in His goodness performs a miracle, and sends him an Angel of Light for an assistant.

You, reader, put this matter to a test: You are sitting now in your school library, teammates are within your call. Summon any one and make this request: “Please get books on Mercury".

Will the teammate quietly say, “Yes, sir,” and go do the task?

On your life, she will not.

We have recently been hearing much maudlin sympathy expressed for the “down-trodden denizen of the sweat shop” and with it all often go many hard words for the men in power.

Nothing is said about the employer who grows old before his time in a vain attempt to get frowsy ne’er-do-wells to do intelligent work; and his long patient striving with “help” that does nothing but loaf when his back is turned.

In your pitying, let us drop a tear, too, for Calvin, striving to carry on a great enterprise, whose working hours are not limited by the whistle, and whose hair is fast turning white through the struggle to hold the line in dowdy indifference, slipshod imbecility, and the heartless ingratitude which, but for their enterprise, would be getting an F.

travisjungroth• 9 years ago

I read that essay and enjoyed it very much. I think it was a message I needed to hear and I plan to read it again.

It also made me think of effective management. Imagine that while Rowan was in the jungle looking for Garcia one of his many bosses stopped by and told him to carry a message to Rivera.

Does he do as he's told without complaint? That means dropping his other task. Does he ask his boss which is more important (a question that is often met with "both are important"). Or more directly, which should he do first ("work on them in parallel").

And all this time, while priorities are being reassessed, Garcia is moving through the hills and no messages are being delivered at all.

posterboy• 9 years ago

You can wrap excuses, or culture, or other corporate vocabulary around the matter

An excuse (ex + causa) is literally an external cause, ie. beyond the responsibility of what has been asked of them.

Managing people is difficult
They [military] are damned good at it

Regarding uncountable dead soldiers, who (hopefully) weren't supposed to die, the track record looks kinda skewed.

lexicality• 9 years ago

You, reader, put this matter to a test: You are sitting now in your office—six clerks are within your call. Summon any one and make this request: “Please look in the encyclopedia and make a brief memorandum for me concerning the life of Corregio.” Will the clerk quietly say, “Yes, sir,” and go do the task? On your life, he will not.

I had a boss like that, he was an asshole.

The idea that the ideal worker (especially in the information industry) is one that will do what you ask without asking questions or requiring explanation is extremely narcissistic. You don't somehow become a better person than everyone else just because you managed to start a business.

mistersquid• 9 years ago

The author of the article also makes a critical mistake in the just-so example you cite, writing

  >And I will lay you ten to one that after you have answered
  >the questions, and explained how to find the information,
  >and why you want it, the clerk will go off and get one of
  >the other clerks to help him find Garcia - and then come
  >                                  ^^^^^^
  >back and tell you there is no such man. Of course I may lose
  >my bet, but according to the Law of Average, I will not.

The historical figure the clerks were told to look for with imprecise identifiers and no business context is "Corregio", not "Garcia".

The author supplanted the subject of research with the mythical "Garcia" but even that metaphorical substitution is problematic because if Corregio:Garcia::research:letter then really all the clerks need do is return to the requester and say "I found Corregio".

It rhetorically opens the question of whether Rowan found Garcia or merely found "a" Garcia.

EDIT: subject verb agreement in first sentence. Add qualifying phrase in second sentence.

kenjackson2• 9 years ago

I think this ignores the problem that in many cases you don't have a good estimate for a date. If the task is one I know well I can estimate well. But if the question is when some new functionality will be deployed, it's just a best guess.

And for many tasks you simply don't know if it is going to work until the day of. Especially when you are trying to schedule aggressively.

valuearb10• 9 years ago

All schedules are guesses. Just tell me when you first figure out yours is wrong, not when it's too late to help.

steve_g• 9 years ago

There's a difference between "getting people to do what they say they will do" and getting people to do whatever is asked of them. Part of the culture described in the article was honest capacity planning. The group didn't do whatever was asked; they honestly negotiated the workload. I don't think you can have a healthy no excuses culture without honest capacity planning.

mythrwy• 9 years ago

I find it an odd idea that the military (at least the US military) is the paradigm of efficiency or organization.

It's true they do have ways to get people do do what is directed but they aren't very efficient and organization at the micro level might be good but not at the macro.

There is a reason the military is so absurdly costly and apparently has trouble decisively ending conflicts. Because all the parts are in place doesn't necessarily mean organization at a higher level.

I also offer as evidence the growth of the use of contractors. Because we apparently can't put three guys in a rowboat for less than a million bucks. That's not organization, even if all uniforms are pressed to specification.

The successes the military does enjoy are more a matter of literal brute force and a big budget rather than organized long term planning IMOP.

SerLava4• 9 years ago

I find it an odd idea that the military (at least the US military) is the paradigm of efficiency or organization.

People in the military usually talk about it being a clusterfuck on the macro level. I think most of the people with this mental model of the military are just office middle managers.

mter• 9 years ago

Managing people is difficult and if there's an organization who has had more experience organizing people to execute objectives than most anyone else, it's the military. They are damned good at it and there exists a lot of manuals and writings to this end.

I was enlisted. The military is a mismanaged, incompetent bureaucracy. You will never see a privately owned business as terrible at everything as the military because private businesses can't manage through fear the way the military can. The military is the last bastion of contractual servitude for a reason. Bad leaders would have literally no one left working for them if we were given a choice.

ndh2• 9 years ago

Maybe I'm missing something, but why is that essay "wonderful"? The way I read it, it's a manager who fails, and blames it on the incompetence of his inferiors. It's wishful thinking. A manager's fantasy. It puts the entire blame on the employee. Its bemoaning of lack of accountability is exactly that, lack of accountability.

I realize this entire thread is filled with confirmation bias. What I see is that this essay has its own Wikipedia entry, made it into popular culture, and survived for 117 year, which is quite remarkable. So I would be very interested in reading what makes this essay great, because I fail to understand it.

Karrot_Kream• 9 years ago

Having worked at a few places in my career now, I've found two dominant styles of management. Either you trust your team, listen to their "excuses", and try to help them unblock themselves (and come up with learnings to increase future velocity), or you _don't_ trust your team and constantly hold the stick above their heads. The former style lends itself to cautious team growth and views each employee as having a valuable skillset, emphasizing low churn. The latter seems to engender a hypergrowth strategy, where employees are seen as "resources" rather than important cornerstones of the company.

Consider the following. Asking for help ends up blocking other employees _also_ laboring under their own deadlines, which incentivizes most employees to ignore requests for help.

kristianc4• 9 years ago

This is a piece of positioning. It's not so much Blank giving any serious solution to the solution of 'no accountability' as him saying 'look at how tough and uncompromising I am.' He literally says he thinks 'creating a culture' is the same as 'I hung a sign on the door.'

Well no. A lot of management thinking (5 Whys etc) has gone into breaking down problems into micro-blockers.

If your graphic designer is constantly sick, then that is a problem, and it doesn't mean that your VP deserves to be fired for failing to open up Photoshop himself. It's not the VP's job to do as it as the VP is not a graphic designer. The VP isn't a hero for having a go- what the VP produces is likely to be shit.

'No excuses' cultures tend to, far from raising accountability, attract the kind of mediocre performers who want to be told what to do, don't want to stretch themselves (as they're frightened of failure) and are looking for the next person to throw under the bus. No thanks.

cj4• 9 years ago

Perhaps you didn't make it to this part of the article:

By accountable I meant, “We agreed on a delivery date, and between now and the delivery date, it’s OK if you ask for help because you’re stuck, or something happened outside of your control. But do not walk into my office the day something is due and give me an excuse. It will cost you your job.” That kind of accountable.
The goal wasn’t inflexible dates and deadlines, it was to build a culture of no surprises and collective problem solving.

kristianc4• 9 years ago

Ah the 'I'll fire your ass if you give me an excuse on the due date but of course an attempt to maintain an open line of communication between now and then will be met with sunshine and rainbows.'

Let's call this disingenuous bullshit what it is - management by fear. Don't tell me you're about 'collective problem solving' in an environment where people are constantly fearing for their jobs.

getpost2• 9 years ago

Then he should call it, "a culture of no surprises and collective problem solving." Calling it "no excuses" is part of the management problem he has identified.

My experience is, there are often other dimensions to the issue of commitment.

There is a conscientiousness that comes from being an owner of a company. It's rare to have an employee who maintains the same level of attention as an "owner." That's just how things are. Demanding that employees increase their attention to their work won't change this, or at least not for long. As the article suggests, you can work on developing a culture where people are more likely to be forthcoming and cooperative, but that only goes so far.

There are some employees who do attend to their work the way an owner would, often to their own detriment. Overwork is a real problem for their own wellbeing, and their overall ability to grow and change. It can be a problem for the employer as well, for lots of reasons, including an over-reliance on a few key people.

You can make sure that everyone has enough of a stake to consider themselves an owner, as in a co-op, but co-ops don't seem to scale. That's fine for plenty of businesses, but not for the kinds of businesses that venture capital wants to invest in.

EDIT: The clip art illustrating the article, Pinocchio, suggests a moral element in the author's world view, it conflates lying with missing deadlines and making excuses and not keeping people informed. If people are lying to you as a manager, you should ask yourself why.

valuearb10• 9 years ago

If your VP is unwilling to pitch in to help team members they aren't much of a leader. If they can't do design work their job is to find someone who can help.

philwelch• 9 years ago

If your graphic designer is constantly sick, then that is a problem, and it doesn't mean that your VP deserves to be fired for failing to open up Photoshop himself. It's not the VP's job to do as it as the VP is not a graphic designer. The VP isn't a hero for having a go- what the VP produces is likely to be shit.

Some would say that's the difference between a graphic designer and a VP. Steve Jobs had a similar view:

Jobs imagines his garbage regularly not being emptied in his office, and when he asks the janitor why, he gets an excuse: The locks have been changed, and the janitor doesn't have a key. This is an acceptable excuse coming from someone who empties trash bins for a living. The janitor gets to explain why something went wrong. Senior people do not. "When you're the janitor," Jobs has repeatedly told incoming VPs, "reasons matter." He continues: "Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering." That "Rubicon," he has said, "is crossed when you become a VP.

smacktoward• 9 years ago

I'm of two minds on this.

As many of the commenters on the original piece note, the idea of a "no excuses culture" will be familiar to anyone who's familiar with the culture of the (U.S., anyway) military, and generally speaking it works quite well there. It helps cut through B.S. and keep everyone focused on the idea that results are the thing that matter, which is important when results can literally mean the difference between life and death. And while it can sound to an outsider like a cruel standard, I personally found my exposure to it freeing -- it means not having to deal with the blame-seeking and post-hoc litigation of small mistakes that we all have to struggle with every day in other contexts. So in that respect, I'm all for it.

The thing is, though, in the context of military culture "no excuses" isn't a stand-alone principle the way it's presented here. It's embedded with a bunch of other, complimentary principles that help sand off its roughest edges.

An example would be the principle that responsibility flows uphill: leaders are responsible for failures of their units, even in cases where the failure is entirely due to mistakes by subordinates -- mistakes that they may not even have known were being made. (Because why didn't the leader know those mistakes were being made? It's their job to train their people to do the right things, and to make sure they're actually doing them.)

This compliments the "no excuses" idea, because it limits its usefulness as a tool for powerful people to push ones farther down the food chain to do unethical things. You're responsible for the things your people do, so there's a strong incentive to make sure not just that they get results, but that they do so in ways that you would be comfortable being judged by.

Without that, "no excuses" becomes a kind of blind eye standard -- "get results, I don't care how." Which can put immense pressure on the person on the receiving end of that directive to cut corners, fudge evidence and cross ethical lines if they have to in order to get those results. And if they do, the leader can then feign innocence: "I never told them to do those horrible things!" Well, yeah, but you put them in a position where the horrible things were they only things they could realistically do. You set them up to fail.

So while I applaud the general idea, I worry that in the absence of complimentary values "from now on showing up with an excuse the day the project is due will cost them their job" becomes just one more way for bad managers to push blame that should rightly go to their own incompetence down down the org chart.

watwut10• 9 years ago

On one hand, I agree that responsibility flowing uphill can help with the pushing down unethical things. However, when dev leader felt so much responsibility for all tasks, he attempt to micromanage us all to absurd degree. I strongly preferred when I was responsible for what I was doing, because then other people don't try to constantly control details of what I feel responsible for.

draw_down2• 9 years ago

Sounds great, if the boss is not somehow magically delivered from being a responsible party, and as long as the boss's reasons for not meeting commitments are not considered somehow different and therefore "not excuses", i.e., acceptable.

icebraining2• 9 years ago

Yeah, that's a great way to destroy moral, ie, have your underlings hate your guts. Parents do this kind of crap to their kids all the time, too, then wonder why them don't get respected.

analog313• 9 years ago

I've always been struck by an odd irony in academia: People tend to have left-wing political beliefs, but maintain an organizational culture that is decidedly authoritarian.

Perhaps this is necessary: I can't think of how else to manage a classroom than to have hard deadlines for things like homework assignments. Even in college, by definition, the work is finished when the semester ends.

I'm personally guilty of missing deadlines at work, and if I were permitted to be honest about it (or if it even mattered), my three excuses would be:

1. Managing the complexity of my job is over my head, because there are too many internal dependencies.

2. I'm going to miss this deadline because x[n] didn't happen, and I can't make those things happen.

3. I was kind of hoping the task would vanish, as roughly 75% of urgent tasks seem to.

aaron-lebo• 9 years ago

Not to detract from your main point, but authoritarianism exists across the political spectrum. See the USSR and Nazi Germany, or modern-day Venezuela and Russia.

That there are authoritarians in academia isn't too surprising - it's all about politics ;)

jacquesm2• 9 years ago

It exists everywhere, no need to single out specific countries.

lucideer• 9 years ago

Nolan charts, or the more typical 2d 4-coloured political compasses used for displaying results of buzzfeed quizzes are not exactly a thorough and accurate representation of the intricate nuances of the political spectrum, but they do improve on the typical binary left-vs-right. The authoritarian left is very much a thing, and in the context of the organisation of educational institutions, quite a nice parallel.

watwut10• 9 years ago

There is no contradiction between left-wing and authoritarianism. Communists as they were rising to power and in power were all about that.

CalChris2• 9 years ago

Similarly, there is no contradiction between right-wing and authoritarianism. We've seen this in Greece, Latin America, ....

protomyth• 9 years ago

I tend to look as the ratio between agreement[1] and force to implement their beliefs. It helps clear out the whole left / right thing that starts people categorizing instead of analyzing.

1) in the freedom of choice way

paulddraper• 9 years ago

Not all organizations should be run the same way.

I would prefer my government to offer more liberty, than, say my employer.

m-j-fox2• 9 years ago

I would prefer my employer to offer more liberty than they do. What's the point living in a liberal democracy if my most local of governments, the corporation, is a bunch of Nazi dick bags?

tensor• 9 years ago

You're looking at academia from a teacher student relationship. Outside of the classroom and teaching it's a very flat structure generally. Individual professors have complete independence from one another. Relationships to government grants, on the other hand, are a different beast.

mate_soos• 9 years ago

If you to treat your employees as children, you will end up with a culture of excuses. If you give and take responsiblity for both your own work and the work of helping others do their work, you will realize that excuses won't be needed. People will inherently know they are either messing up or have messed up and will volountarily ask for help from others, who will help.

Not trusting and respecting in your employees will corner them to behave like children and you will eternally (be unhappy to) be their parent. Treat people with trust and respect and expect the same. It will make for a much more happy and a much better performing team and ultimately, company.

jacquesm2• 9 years ago

The whole problem is 'hands off management'. Just get out of your jacket and work along periodically with the people that are below you in the org chart. That will create an atmosphere of being in it 'together' and it will work wonders for team spirit. It will also help to convey that you actually know your stuff (which will cut down on bullshit excuses like nothing else). Miraculously, even when you're in meeting with higher ups or other departments, the work will continue (who would have thought).

Of course that would require management to be able to actually do something. The best managers I worked for did just that, and I copied their style as much as possible.

Managers that isolate themselves from their department are the very worst kind. One guy I knew literally had a code-lock on his door to make sure he wasn't bothered when he was doing 'important' stuff (which was all the time, his door was always closed). Guess what happened to productivity in that particular company.

williamdclt• 9 years ago

I'm surprised that nobody here realize that this marketing team has reinvented part of agile and lean managment? Making devs accountable but not holding responsible, group solving problems and Andon, prioritizing tasks, a bit about handling external dependencies, kind of sprints, visibility, staying on budget...

They're obviously not following Scrum in Action at the letter, but I really saw a striking resemblance with the "agile & lean" company where I work

watwut10• 9 years ago

I would not say so. In agile, individual developer does not have personal responsibility for anything. In this system, individual person had own task and was accountable for that task completion. It also sounds like they were working independently and wouldn't get help unless they asked for it.

"I will fire you if deadline is suddenly not met and no one else is there find out before if you don't say so" is on the opposite extreme from agile "everything is collective task, we check up on you every four hours and you are neither autonomous nor responsible".

mindcrime6• 9 years ago

In agile, individual developer does not have personal responsibility for anything.

Where in the world do you get this idea? For one, there is no such thing as "agile", in the sense of a prescriptive methodology that would make such a declaration. There are just individual methodologies that claim varying levels of adherence to the Agile Manifesto[1]. And even then, the popular "Agile" methodologies like Scrum, XP, etc. never say that no one has personal responsibility for anything. Some say that teams are self-organizing and that you succeed or fail as a team, but I think everybody understands that that later part doesn't mean you can just come in and stare at the walls all day with no consequences.

we check up on you every four hours

If someone is "checking up on you every four hours" it's almost 100% certain that whatever process you're using has absolutely nothing to do with "agile".

NAHWheatCracker• 9 years ago

It's not surprising that no one else commented about it because agile/scrum/lean are terms that cast a huge net.

If I just set deadlines, then I've recreated part of Scrum which has deadlines at the end of Sprints. Deadlines existed long before Scrum was defined.

I think of Agile, Scrum, and Lean as just names for common ideas about the nature of how work can get done efficiently. Very few of the ideas from these practices are unique to those practices. The reasoning for why those ideas work doesn't go away if you don't call it Agile/Scrum/Lean.

The important thing to recognize is that the ideas have merits on their own, and their inclusion in any particular lexicon or philosophy is incidental.

Sorreah3• 9 years ago

I don't like that article. I believe that it's entirely backwards actually.

If you actually do everything right in your organisation, you'll end up with a "no empty excuses" culture anyway. If you try to enforce a "no excuses" culture without doing all the other things right, then your team is likely suffering and often won't get the chance to express themselves in actually pursuing what they think needs to be done instead. Sometimes, your team members have an equally good idea about where you should be focusing your efforts to get the most value out of them or avoid future pain points, despite what most management people think.

So if you go about this wrong, you might lose that, but what's worse you might end up losing the wrong people. Sometimes things are out of your control. And even when you can get help, when everyone is focused on doing their best to avoid being fired, help from someone else is hard to get.

So if you fix everything that would make following such a management strategy a huge disaster, you quite possibly end up not having to enforce such a strategy, because you got people willing to help each other and people who know what matters and what needs to be done.

You end up with a "no excuses" team after you fix all these, but that's an emergent fact not the fact that got you all your success.

placebo• 9 years ago

While I agree with everything you wrote about "no excuses" being a side effect of a healthy frame of mind, and that in an ideal situation things should be motivated by passion and not by fear, I wonder if perhaps sometimes the amount of damage created from long exposure to a bad environment is not something that can be easily undone and one has to revert to the stick to achieve results. I wouldn't want to manage or be managed in such an organisation, , but I can imagine there are situations where discipline needs to be enforced when the culture is too far gone due to past mistakes. Using the analogy to human personality, you probably won't fix deep rooted pathologies or self destructive habits overnight by motivation talks. Maybe sometimes things have to be artificially straightened out because the time for a natural fix would just take too long.

xrd• 9 years ago

At first I was really resistant to reading this. "No excuses" sounds like something someone who has never been responsible for impossible engineering deadlines gets to say. But, I really like the way Blank defines it as "be in communication and ask for help so there are no surprises." That is great: I often find myself avoiding being in communication because I'm sure someone will offer uncomfortable solutions. But, those are the difference between a mediocre organization and a superb one.

cj4• 9 years ago

+1 - I think this is key: "be in communication and ask for help so there are no surprises."

The title of the article would probably be more palatable as "No surprises" since by "No excuses" he really means no bullshit excuses a day before the deadline. Then again, an article titled "No surprises" probably wouldn't have gotten this many upvotes.

tzakrajs• 9 years ago

Sounds to me like the real problem is that Steve Blank does not have a system to get enough context from individual contributors to know that a project is slipping well before the deadline. This is a management problem being cast as a individual contributor problem (we need to fire those lazy, incompetent employees who don't ask for help when they should /s), what a bizarre inversion of reasoning.

Edit: Management should be the ones held accountable for projects slipping their deadlines. The individual contributors don't just auto-assemble into on-time results.

sprafa2• 9 years ago

Thank god someone got it. Toyota Production system talks about exactly the same thing. It's the manager's job to make sure everything is running on time.

valuearb10• 9 years ago

Toyota makes cars, most of the employees are doing specificsly defined tasks, they aren't usually knowledge workers. It's the managers responsibility that schedules are met, but empowering subordinates to work independently and only interrupt for problems they can't solve is far more efficient than micromanaging each one.

valuearb10• 9 years ago

You miss the point that "no excuses" is exactly that system.

A manager shouldn't have to ping every subordinate every day for status updates, that's annoying to both and should be unnecessary. Management only works through delegation, you need to trust your subordinates to do delegated tasks without hand-holding, but you also need to give them a protocol for exceptions, which is exactly what this is.

Managers usually have other work besides managing people, from their own projects to strategic planning and budgeting. If you are required to also micromanage the projects of your subordinates, you have the wrong subordinates.

cardiffspaceman• 9 years ago

I abhor status meetings with the round-robin format. As an individual contributor I love to collaborate with anti-meeting managers. The catch is to get the IC's to provide timely information on successes and blocks. I like the idea of asking that all the IC's email announcements of their successes as they happen. There's one less reason for the "status" meeting. The rest of the equation is to get people to automatically network about their blocks. That takes care of another major, routine component of status meeting. Now it can be valuable to workshop or otherwise, in one place, collaborate about a problem. I once had a manager who supported classic-form scrums. He was the one who had the Outlook fu for scheduling a meeting on the calendar, so he scheduled the scrums, but he did not appear at the scrums. He did circulate among his reports, but he didn't have to have long conversations with them, because all the other mechanisms were getting the work done.

A regularly-scheduled meeting tends to become the ONE channel for communication, and with such a meeting on the calendar it is a little unconvincing for a manager to say that they want to hear about blockers before the meeting instead of during it.

Mz7• 9 years ago

It sounds to me like he walked into a situation where accountability did not exist and then he fixed the problem. He inherited the problems. He didn't create them.

The piece is full of good advice on how to set up a culture where things actually get done.

tonylemesmer• 9 years ago

He does have a system. Communication between managers and doers. That's all he's asking for.

chadaustin• 9 years ago

Funny, I was just thinking about this and Steve Blank.

Early at IMVU we really struggled with our crash rate. It was a 3D desktop application for _mainstream computers_. This was back before Windows 7 and everyone had terrible onboard graphics chips with equivalently terrible drivers.

During a board of advisors meeting, our CEO presented our crash metrics and justified it by saying "We might not be able to improve these metrics much - we're one of the only applications shipping 3D graphics on almost every computer."

Steve Blank immediately ripped into him: "That's an engineer's justification! Figure it out!"

I felt pretty guilty because I was the one who'd planted that idea in our CEO's head just days before.

Of course there _were_ ways to improve application reliability in the presence of driver crashes. You just have to move the rendering code into another process like Chrome does, detect when it crashes, and restart. :)

quotemstr• 9 years ago

You can do the same on Android: the stagefright client libraries are terribly buggy, and sometimes crash if you get the timing wrong or tickle the demuxers the wrong way. It's possible (but undocumented) to send Surface instances across Binder to a separate service process and render there. There are no obsolete ideas.

jacques_chester2• 9 years ago

"That's an engineer's justification! Figure it out!"

I find that I like Steve Blank less and less.

You might as well yell at your lawyers, your accountants or a physicist. Some things are.

The problem is that, once in a while, a professional opinion is wrong. So the Blanks of the world remember only the occasions where they bullied someone and lucked out -- then assume their Non-Excusing was the magic ingredient.

eric_b• 9 years ago

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that most people on HN don't like this attitude. I used to think this kind of thing was stupid too. "Oh, management by fiat, that will never work". I see comments here talking about management by fear, or, ironically, making excuses as to why this won't work most places.

I've worked in numerous Fortune 500's, and without a doubt the biggest piece missing from the dysfunctional teams is always accountability. Or lack of responsibility and ownership (said another way). The high performing teams don't tolerate excuses or abdication of responsibility. They may not come right out and say it explicitly, but between the lines of success, that's what's going on. If you're on a team that sucks, it's probably because no one cares about doing a good job.

There are many ways to increase accountability and responsibility, but sometimes people do need to lose their jobs. Trying hard is not sufficient when you're making six figures a year. Steve Jobs (I think) had the quote - "Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, excuses stop mattering". In my world, that's once you start making 100% more money than the median. I've never seen a big organization that couldn't lose 25% of its people and not miss a beat. In some cases 50%.

Anyways, our culture has moved beyond responsibility and accountability. People joke about participation ribbons and "everyone gets a trophy" - but speaking generally, most of the younger employees I've encountered don't know what it takes to really succeed. They don't understand how hard you actually have to work to be better-than-competent at something. I know it sounds very "get off my lawn" - but the change (generalizing of course) is real enough.

getpost2• 9 years ago

A big problem in our culture now is that there isn't accountability at the senior level and now everyone knows it. (But eric_b's comment seems perfectly reasonable, and I'm baffled it's being downvoted.)

TheOtherHobbes2• 9 years ago

This may work, but only if the culture of accountability goes all the way to the top.

It rarely does. It's more usual that once you get past a certain level, the Jobs Rule is reversed. Project failures and corporate problems are mysteriously and inexplicably never caused by bad management or poor executive decisions, and blatant incompetence stops being an impediment to promotion.

weixiyen• 9 years ago

I agree with you.

The truth is, the high performers meet the deadlines with ease, and go beyond them pretty much effortlessly the majority of the time, so holding them accountable doesn't make them scared, it gives them a platform to feature their ability.

When someone is performing above expectations and others around them are not meeting expectations and not being held accountable, resentment sets in.

One of the best ways to lose your top performers is not to hold everyone accountable.

always_somethng• 9 years ago

  No excuses for failures given, just facts and requests for help
  No excuses for failures accepted, just facts, and offers to help
  Relentless execution
  Individual honesty and integrity

Wow! I didn't know that the political aspects of small in-groups was so simple!

We can just proclaim "PROBLEMS BE GONE!" and so it shall be! It's also so clear to me now!

What a load of crap. I've been on at least six developer teams, and the one thing that's proven true every time is that third party externalities will always find a way to hobble progress, introduces stalls in productivity, and wear down morale.

But there are deeper issues, particularly with software development, and undisprovable beliefs about which implementation of technology is THE ONE TRUE WAY.

People will always use that as a wedge, to alleviate the amount of work on their plate, and declare efficiency as the driving principle. But then! Non-technical people, clueless as ever about the machines that govern their livelihood (as glorified CRM receptionists) fail to understand, the truth is that it's just technical people pushing work around, spreading it in different arrangements, according to their liking.

  Let's bind everything to UNIX users 
  and LDAP permissions, that way the 
  system administrators can control 
  progress, and must be aware of all 
  tangential events.

  Gee, I can't create a folder structure
  on this file system, because I have to 
  wait for a sys admin to provide permissions
  just so I can create an index.html file
  at the location I need.

  How about we throw everything in a MySQL 
  database, and persist our data over there?

  Awesome, but wow, our table schema is 
  getting kind of huge. Managing it is 
  a chore unto itself.

  Let the DBA team control every aspect 
  of the RDBMS, so that every change to 
  the database schema requires their 
  involvement. This way, we'll always 
  have to ask them for permission to 
  introduce a new table or column.

  Okay, how about we just design our
  tables, to be gigantic structured 
  text blobs, of unlimited size, so
  that we don't have to wait for a DBA
  to respond to our schema change 
  requests? Sounds great! It's less work!

  NoSQL vs. SQL. Which is the one TRUE way?

  Man, this CGI programming is really 
  hard, and our PERL codebase is tough to read.
  Let's try PHP since it's so much easier to code.

  Wow, our PHP code is so disorganized.
  We should organize it into classes.

  That didn't help. PHP permits too 
  many ambiguities, and it's counter-productive.

  Javascript everywhere, at all times? 
  Why not a full re-write of the entire 
  system, because all we know how to use 
  is one client-side technology?

  Object Oriented Programming or Functional 
  Programming. Which is the one TRUE way?

  I'm having trouble sorting out which 
  functions are in scope, because there 
  are so many modules in this file tree,
  and I can't easily discern which file 
  references which, and in which order.
  So many functions are similarly named, 
  and many developers are simply overriding
  namespaces to control scope. We should 
  restrict who can create new files in
  this tree, so the library stays sane.

  Let's bind everything to UNIX users 
  and LDAP permissions, that way the 
  system administrators can control 
  progress, and must be aware of all 
  tangential events.

And so on...

Animats• 9 years ago

That's the Curtis LeMay approach to management.[1] He was famously into management by fear.

We see this problem in software, especially in DevOps and "agile" shops, because the process is so forgiving of delay. In a manufacturing plant, no product comes out until all the component parts are ready. So there's a "no excuses" culture about running out of parts, or having an assembly line station down unexpectedly. Software rarely has that.

Organizations with real "no excuses" cultures have spares and reserves. They have a backup plan if a key person is sick or unavailable, or something important doesn't show up. They have slogans like "two is one and one is none". This is seldom seen in software development.

[1] http://www.au.af.mil/au/afri/aspj/digital/pdf/articles/2014-...

mindcrime6• 9 years ago

He was famously into management by fear.

What does that have to do with this article?

RandomOpinion• 9 years ago

He was famously into management by fear.

The article you linked to says precisely the opposite and is more in line with the blog post. LeMay made it clear that results were expected and got them.

TheOtherHobbes2• 9 years ago

LeMay almost started WWIII. I don't think he's a good example in this context.

I'm in the "tone deaf management bullshit" camp. It starts with the assumption that your people are basically incompetent losers and it's up to you to stomp around and whip them into shape.

It doesn't work in most areas, and it especially doesn't work in software dev.

If your people aren't acting like responsible professionals, either your culture is broken, or you're hiring the wrong people for the wrong reasons - or both.

Given the chance most adult professionals will be adult and professional. Some will even take pride in doing a good job.

If that's not happening, unprofessional management won't fix it.

watwut10• 9 years ago

Software business is different - that much redundancy in planning would make you loose customers or annoy higher levels of management. That is whole reason for agile - you trade safe planning for week by week transparency and tight estimates.

It us also price for doing bew things. Web shops that crank one similar project after another tend to be on time - they work like factory.

BinaryWaves• 9 years ago

Yet another person blind to greed, so focused on money and profit they miss out on life

scandox• 9 years ago

No surprises. Agreed. Consequences. Agreed. Firing people. Bad idea. If the biggest lesson you teach people is the one they learn as they leave your organization, then I think you're wasting a good crisis.

tyingq• 9 years ago

He's in disagreement with himself.

See point #3: https://steveblank.com/2012/05/14/9-deadliest-start-up-sins/

Fraztastic• 9 years ago

Manager has piss poor communication then "solves" it by threatening to fire people. Genius.

munin• 9 years ago

Whatever kind of person Steve Blank is as a person is being discussed to death in the comments. I think that what this shows is that most people on HN have a lot of scar tissue from bad management. Bad management will say "tell me your problems before they become excuses" but then ignore you, then, berate you when the deadline comes due. "Why isn't the project done?" "Well like I told you last week..." "Don't give me excuses!" We've all been there.

What Steve Blank writes here is the outer dialog and what seems to be missing is the inner dialog - listen to what your reports say! When an engineer says to you, at the end of the day, "this component just doesn't make any sense and I don't know what to do to make it work" don't just slap them on the back on the way out the door and say "I'm sure you'll figure it out, just try a little harder," maybe you as a manager should engage a little more then in the moment.

gluggymug• 9 years ago

It's all about bad management. But it's about how they make plans and deadlines in the first place.

If they don't spare a thought for what future problems can come up and make allowances and contingencies for these risks then they can't manage. Who cares if you tell them about problems early if there's no ability/wiggle room to change directions?

If management don't want surprises, try thinking ahead. It's called risk management. Who is to blame when a predictable issue eventuates? Not engineering. If you have no slack in the schedule get ready for shit to hit the fan.

kerkeslager• 9 years ago

Excuses happen because people don't want to be blamed. If your team had an excuses problem, it's a response to a blame problem: when a problem is identified, people aren't looking for solutions, they're looking for someone to blame.

Saying "no excuses" and "we're holding people accountable" might fix the excuses problem, but it exacerbates the blame problem. "Holding people accountable" is just blaming people harder and hoping that will pressure then into perfection. It might work for a little while, but it's unsustainable. People will crack. This is especially bad in this story because it's literally coupled with a threat of termination.

The real solution, I think, is to not play the blame game. Instead of "whose fault is this" you can just operate in facts: "what happened", "how can we fix it", "how can we avoid it in the future". Sometimes the facts reflect badly on someone ("he showed up high and made the wrong decision") but more often there's no blame needed to address the problem ("he made the wrong decision because nobody trained him"). Instead of creating a culture where people turn against each other to "hold each other accountable" for problems, you want to create a culture where people team up to solve problems.

The story here is a success story, but I don't think it can be attributed to the "no excuses" rule--I've seen similar policies fail miserably. Instead, I'd attribute their success to their encouragement to identify problems early and ask for help. But that probably could have been done with less friction if they had addressed the blame problem.

crooked-v• 9 years ago

The treatment of airplane crashes comes to mind here for me. Crash studies look for cultural and technical improvements that reduce the risk of the same thing happening again, as even "pilot error" ultimately points to some problem in education or work environment.

m-j-fox2• 9 years ago

That, and the pilot is rarely around to take any blame.

k2xl• 9 years ago

I couldn't agree more with this comment - and maybe I have a case of confirmation bias, but it's precisely the way I manage my team. Putting blame on someone doesn't help make problems go away - I've found that it just makes people defensive and makes the problem worse.

By setting a tone with questions like "What happened? How can we fix this problem from happening in future?" the team will end up finding solutions with technology or process.

As a manager, I feel you're job is to try and get your team to problem solve - using their tools and knowledge to come up with solutions.

In the example from the comment above, if someone is showing up high, or doing something really bad, then it's up to the manager to have the discussion about with the employee. Obviously if bad patterns repeat themselves then that's ground for termination.

dccoolgai• 9 years ago

Some blue collar guys I used to work with had a saying: "Shit rolls downhill". Years later, I realized that had a lot to do with the way orgs with bad management deal with tech/dev: everyone likes to talk about accountability when it goes downhill to the devs, but no one wants to talk about accountability for having a clue about what they want. You could plug in space heaters in a circle in a conference room and it would have about the same effect.

WalterBright4• 9 years ago

My father was a professor teaching business at a small college. On his first semester teaching, he assigned an essay due in a couple months. He said any papers turned in a day late got docked one grade, two days two grades, etc. He said no excuses would be accepted, because they had two months to do the work.

The due date rolled around, and half the class turned in their papers late, and got docked grades accordingly.

The next semester, there was only one paper late one day.

analog313• 9 years ago

Now try a new experiment:

* There are 60 students, all taking 5 classes, with multiple assignments due at random time points in each class.

* To finish any assignment, the student needs several tasks to be performed by other students in different disciplines.

* The exact amount of effort required for any of those tasks is unknown.

* The college has ordered the professors to assign just a bit more work than can possibly be completed, or equivalently, has under-estimated the number of students needed to complete all of the assigned tasks.

WalterBright4• 9 years ago

Giving people impractical tasks and expecting miracles is something else entirely.

jacques_chester2• 9 years ago

I take it you spoke to my professors.

WalterBright4• 9 years ago

Teaching business, he also wrote this on the blackboard on the first day one semester:

    business
    entrepreneuer
    its it's
    there they're their

And said that if any of these words were misspelled on a paper or exam, it was an automatic F.

He was sick of business majors misspelling business, and said after the new policy he didn't have to give anyone an F for that. Nobody complained about it, either.

Give people reasonable standards to live up to, and they will. In fact, they'll thrive on it.

ScottBurson2• 9 years ago

I guess your post gets an F -- it's "entrepreneur" :-)

seangrogg• 9 years ago

This sounds somewhat aligned with the culture that my manager has fostered where I'm working - just spun a different way:

We come up with a target that we plan on achieving in 6 weeks and then we have said 6 weeks to execute on that plan. For example, if our goal is to add four features to a product we write it down and the intent is to deliver in six weeks.

That being said, no excuses. When it comes time to deliver we should be able to deliver on anything that we committed to. BUT - and I think this is what Steve does a poor job of spinning - it's not that we have to have our original plan fully executed; rather, if we found a problem along the way it's expected that we raise the issue and course-correct. If one of those four features turns out to hit a snag we alert the PMs and generally just cut back our scope.

The thing is that we are accountable for our work. Accountability does not mean that you'll necessarily accomplish everything on your plate - it just means that at the end of our timeline we don't throw up our arms and say that it didn't get done. We've been transparent with our stakeholders the entire way and so when something goes awry they knew about it well ahead of time and could do their own expectation management with whomever their stakeholders are - thus putting everyone in a much better position.

While I would refrain from calling this a "no excuses" culture - which sounds really dickish and annoyingly managerial - I would say a culture of accountability is an extremely strong and empowering thing. It puts the onus on you to execute but enough latitude to express when execution is no longer feasible within the expected window.

The no excuses culture

Related Stories