Good Boss, Bad Boss, by Bob Sutton – Book Review

Posted on August 9, 2010 by Krishna

Good Boss Bad BossBob Sutton was kind enough to send me the galley of his forthcoming book “Good Boss, Bad Boss” (GBBB) a few weeks ago. I am quite fond of Bob’s books and blog posts, and was eagerly looking forward to this book. Bob’s previous book, “The No-Asshole Rule” was one of the best books I read in 2007. But as good as “The No Asshole Rule” was, GBBB is a much more valuable book for managers. It is more oriented towards introspection and action for those who strive towards becoming better managers.

“The No-Asshole Role” resonated with many people because it illustrated the widespread problem of workplace jerks and bullies in very vivid terms. It also provided useful advice to employees suffering in demeaning workplaces. But unfortunately, as many people learned, gifting the book to an office thug in the hope that they may recognize themselves and improve upon their behavior quite often backfired. Even really malicious people think they can do no wrong and so there must be some problem with you for imagining otherwise.

So while “The No-Asshole Rule” was a timely book for the workplace bullied, it had its limitations as a self-improvement book. We all know a few contemptible people (who are not us) and we tend to spot them (not ourselves) in the book. And so far as we recognize ourselves capable of exhibiting the bad behavior in “The No-Asshole Rule”, we don’t think we are permanent jerks, but instead “forced by circumstances” to do bad things. The book also muddied the waters somewhat by examining instances where being a jerk actually resulted in getting things done.

“Good Boss, Bad Boss” brings back the focus to who is really important. Bob Sutton clearly states, “It is All About You”. It is not about somebody else you can identify and point fingers at. As Jim Collins would say, no more looking out the window. Instead look in the mirror and understand what you need to be a better boss. You may say that this is par for the course for any management book, but most books may it sound that doing so is the easiest thing in the world. Bob’s achievement is that he explains how hard it is, how one should not underestimate the effort and pitfalls and how much effort one must put in, physically and mentally.

To give one instance, Bob explains how closely followers notice what their leaders do: every word, action or facial expression is observed and analyzed to death. The managed even pay careful attention to what the boss is wearing and build their wardrobe around that. For a boss who prides herself on clear communication, it can seem unfair that her carefully measured written word is not the only message reaching her employees from her. But that is the world in which she has to manage. And she has to put significant effort in understanding all the messages (conscious or otherwise) emanating from her.

There was also a temptation reading “The No-Asshole Rule” to conclude that being a good boss means not being a jerk. “Good Boss, Bad Boss” sets that right: it is not enough to be a pleasant boss, you also have to be effective in action and in temperament. Bob also shows how great bosses strike the right balance: just the appropriate level of assertiveness and consensus-building. And sometimes, bosses have to make tough decisions (for example, letting people go), but they find a way to do even the bad things the right way.

Every page in “Good Boss, Bad Boss” is packed with wisdom, but here are some of the overarching themes:

  1. Do you have the right mindset to become a good boss? Ever examine why you want to be a boss and whether you are doing the right things?
  2. A good boss cannot control everything (or even much), but by seeming to be in control through wielding power effectively, they can do a better job of managing outcomes.
  3. Be wise, be continuously learning and be humble.
  4. Grow your team with stars that work together and get rid of those who are destructive to the team spirit and results.
  5. Prioritize action. Ensure that the walk matches the talk.
  6. Protect your employees from people, policies and activities that hurt their productivity and emotional state.
  7. Management is not all roses. It involves making and implementing tough decisions. Learn to do them right instead of avoiding them and creating a wreck when you are finally forced into them.
  8. We are all jerks at least some of the time. Your goal should be to get from “some” to “none”.
  9. Being obsessed about self-improvement is the road to becoming a better boss.

Bob Sutton has done an amazing job of exploring every theme and related ideas in detail in the book. In fact, “Good Boss, Bad Boss” was an uncharacteristically slow read for me, because it made me pause quite often to think about how some piece of advice applied to me and my work. I kept thinking, “I should be doing this right now.” or “I should have been doing this years ago.”

Accepting a managerial position always entails a modicum of ego, thinking that we are capable of leading others properly. But the truth is that most of us (including I) are only doing a small fraction of the things to be effective and good managers. Books like “Good Boss, Bad Boss” bring us back to earth and show us how much we need to improve. I believe that every manager reading this book will find something to adopt. And they, as I, will go back repeatedly to remind themselves what is important in managing people.

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Convincing People

Posted on July 14, 2010 by Krishna

How do you make someone change their opinions? Scott Berkun has an article with some thoughts on how to convince people, primarily that you have to understand the viewpoint of the other person and try to put your argument in their terms. Instead of what a change means in abstract terms, explain the benefits that will accrue to them and perhaps that will turn their minds around.

There are many such mechanisms to convince people. One of the better books I have read on the topic is Robert Cialdini’s “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion”. Cialdini identified devices such as reciprocation, commitment, consistency, scarcity, liking, authority and social proof that aid in getting people to do what you want. He called them “weapons of influence” because they can be used for evil too, and you should be wary of bad elements trying to manipulate you with them.

Some of these influence mechanisms, such as scarcity, are short-term and are mostly useful in a sales situation. The long-term way to influence people is to ensure that you are doing everything that builds their trust in you and that you are repaying that trust in your dealings with them.

This is one goal that is worth striving for in professional life. This is the whole idea behind gaining a good education, continuously learning and acquiring the right experience. By demonstrating your knowledge and skills, you allow customers to trust you. But it also serves the real purpose of having the expertise so that customers are actually right in trusting you.

Trust is a fluctuating resource. Everyone starts with a level of trust. Sometimes this can be negative (for example, criminals). Your interactions with others either increases or decreases the trust. The unfortunate thing about trust is that while it takes a huge effort to build complete trust, a single wrong move can totally deplete it. People have different trusting personalities, ranging from gullible to suspicious. And they may also (rightly) trust you differently on different subjects. For example, while they may accept everything you say on electronics, your advice on car maintenance falls on deaf ears.

This is all perfectly normal human behavior. You have to work within these constraints and prove that you are worthy of the initial trust. You have to show your proper credentials. At work, that is easy as long as you stay within your area of expertise. Once you go outside your specialization, first you need to explain to people why they should take you seriously.

Many change advocates miss this point and go right to the “pros” part of the discussion. And they fail to understand why people miss such obvious advantages and get angry about it. Unfortunately, the bitter truth is that the other persons simply don’t trust them. Maybe they are worried about their motives or capabilities, but there it is.

The biggest example of this is in politics. In many cases, a liberal political leader cuts deals with Wall Street or a conservative politician makes peace with an enemy nation, both contrary to the instincts of their political party, but which party loyalists defend because they trust the leader and her motives while a similar step from their opposition would have raised howls and protests.

So first gain trust. Being sincere helps. Then convincing them becomes much easier.

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Tracking Conversations

Posted on June 30, 2010 by Krishna

Steve Rowe has a management tip:

When doing 1:1’s with your team (you are doing these regularly, right?), take notes to keep track of the conversations from week to week. I currently use a 5-tab notebook with one tab for each direct report. Each person has their own section. Each week when we meet, I take notes on the next page in their section. This makes it really easy to refer back to last week’s notes and follow up on any ongoing issues.

This is good, but I would go a little beyond that. The drawback behind Steve’s idea is that only Steve has the information of what he has to follow up on. Ideally, you would also like the other person to be aware of what would be asked in the next meeting and ensure that they are on track with what they have to do. This way, both sides are on the same page and there is no accidental misunderstanding.

One way to do this is with a task management system or even a Wiki with pages for each person. Everyone can view their tasks and, if allowed, peek at other’s tasks also. There are pros and cons, Wikis allowing more free text, whereas a task-based system can have specific fields that can be used for easier searching.

But you could also have a poor man’s conversation tracking system using just email. Simply have an email that is continuously updated by either party and mailed to the other. You start by listing the action items and mailing it out to the team member. When the team member has a new update on a task (such as completion or unexpected delay), they just add this to the email text and reply back to you (removing the unnecessary email thread text since it is only you two who are emailing each other). When you have a conversation, one party again updates the email text and sends it to the other.

Any method is fine as long as you can do it consistently and easily.

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37 Signals’ Rework: A Missed Opportunity

Posted on June 28, 2010 by Krishna

37Signals is one of my favorite companies; their flagship product, Basecamp, one of the best web applications I have used. Their blog, Signal vs. Noise (SVN), is a great resource for application designers and small business entrepreneurs. So I was excited about reading their new book “Rework“. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a major disappointment.

To be honest, this did not come as a total surprise. Before buying the book, I heard an SVN podcast (transcript) where Jason Fried and David Hansson discuss criticism of “Rework” where they made it clear that they were targeting new readers and that if you have been a long-time reader of SVN, then probably the ideas in the book will not be new.

Point taken. But what I didn’t expect was that the book seemed to be simply a collection of past SVN blog posts. It makes for easier reading, but it also makes it much like a PowerPoint slide with bullet points. Do this, do that and, voilà, success! There are a few running themes, but no overarching ones that bring the book together. Bringing out blog post collections as books is fairly common nowadays and could be a good first step to get into book writing. But 37Signals had already taken that step with the “Getting Real” book and this would have been a nice opportunity to get it together.

Taken individually, many articles in the book are very good. The best part of the book was its section on “Reasons to Quit” – a list of questions on whether it makes sense to build the product you are working on. I also liked most of the writing on productivity, making quick decisions, hiring, guerrilla marketing and work culture. For small organizations, these section make excellent points and are actionable.

It is when 37Signals starts talking about the big picture that they go wrong, making dubious assertions without providing enough evidence or addressing counter-arguments. Let’s start with their point about “Outside Money is Plan Z”, where they rail against taking investor money. There is one good reason for fearing outside investment: having to share the power of running the company. Most other reasons are justifications based on the fear of the unknown: what if the investor kicks you out of the company or changes your product, which is possible, but not necessarily true. However, 37Signals makes absolute declarations stating, “It is usually a bad deal”, or “building a quality business” gets short shrift.

What is amusing is that 37Signals does have an external investor (Jeff Bezos) though reading the book, you would not guess this. “Rework” does not make it clear why an investor like Bezos is better than the “other” outside money. There are many examples of companies (notably Google) who have taken investment (while making zero revenue) and gone on to bigger things. And there have been companies that have sunk, too. So is it just investor money, or is it something else? Are there good investors and bad investors? These are questions you will not get answers to in “Rework”.

A regret that many founders interviewed in Jessica Livingstone’s book “Founders at Work” had in common was that they should have traded keeping a larger share for making a larger pie, because they could have achieved much more with greater capital and they greatly overestimated the possibility of losing control. All companies need capital to go to the next level (or even to keep their existing business). And companies can decide what they want to do – increase liabilities (take loans), share equity, lose a few customers – but there is no point in ruling out an option before you have to make the decision.

Many businesses make good money and can sustain themselves without outside funding or taking on debt, but others cannot. For example, if you develop an algorithm that use search results in a unique manner, you may be unable to monetize it unless you are bought out by Google or Microsoft. But that cannot be done until you create a proof of concept that may take dedicated effort over a period of months. (Yes, you could file a patent, but sometimes the patent collects dust.) A venture capitalist may be able to provide the funding to take the concept to fruition. I don’t see anything wrong with such flipping, but “Rework” takes a tough stance against anything that smells of venture capital.

Much of the remaining parts of “Rework” reminds me of what a car salesperson told me when I asked him whether the car I was interested in had ABS (anti-lock braking system). He said, “Why do you need ABS? I would never buy a car with ABS. If I hit the brakes, I want the car to stop.” Obviously having no idea what ABS does.

In the same way, “Rework” attempts to portray anything 37Signals lacks as a virtue (“Embrace Constraints“), becoming almost a militant version of the classic “Sour Grapes” fable. I sometimes got the feeling that 37Signals feels a bit insecure (it shouldn’t be) about being a small company and wants to spin the narrative. This is laying the foundation for accusations of hypocrisy in the future as the ever-growing, profitable 37Signals will “outgrow” its own advice and do things that they are fulminating against in the present.

There is a thing about being a pugnacious entrepreneur surviving against all odds, but the sad truth is that many small businesses are woefully under-funded and under-staffed. Making lemonade from lemons is admirable, but your goal should be to break free of the constraints that hinder your product and deliver a better deal to your customers and employees. Enforced constraints (“sell only to sub-$10million customers“) are a different story altogether, but “Rework’ does not make this distinction.

Some concepts in “Rework” also seem like they would only work for tiny companies; “tiny” as in one to five employees. For example, “Don’t Write It Down”, “Why Grow”, “Planning is Guessing”, etc. seem very juvenile. Even for small companies (<50 employees), many of these concepts should be thought through carefully before adoption.

I could go on with more examples, but I want to go back to my original point, which is that this is not a book. It is just a bunch of thoughts that have been polished, but not been developed carefully. Some of the articles happen to be well-written, but others simply thrown out there. So while there is good value in reading the book, the reader has to be on the lookout for ideas that don’t make much sense.

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Decision-Making Protocol

Posted on June 24, 2010 by Krishna

One of my acquaintances is fond of saying, “Employees view managers as monsters, at the worst, and idiots, at the best.” The point being that, even good managers have to overcome mistrust about their intentions and judgment before employees accept their decisions. When a manager’s request comes into conflict with the opinions of employees, buy-in can be difficult and elusive.

Cases of outright insubordination are rare and easily dealt with. The real problem is when there is no support for a request, but no one is willing or interested in showing their disapproval. So a decision that seemed unanimous ends up dying quietly during implementation.

Lack of dissent doesn’t always mean hidden antagonism. It can literally mean, “everyone in support”. Which means that it requires a careful manager to understand when people are silent in support (“OK, that seems obvious“) or silent in stunned rejection (“Are you really serious?“). But evaluating facial expressions and tones can be tricky. A better approach would be to evaluate the decision-making process and protocol.

As a first step, managers need to show employees, “I can make mistakes. I need your help to correct them. Question me when you think I am wrong. I will respect your objections. And accept meaningful corrections to my decisions.“ Employees already know that managers can make mistakes. But they usually presume that the managers think of themselves as God and don’t like to be questioned. And so they don’t talk back.

Making such a statement sounds corny and may probably backfire. People are used to managers announcing noble intentions and then doing the opposite. That is why I wrote “show” instead of “tell”. Managers must show their willingness to listen to counter-proposals and accept useful suggestions. And not summarily dismiss ideas even when they sound silly. This requires tremendous self-discipline and also policing, when team members beat up each other’s ideas.

It is also necessary to avoid questioning people’s integrity and focus on their knowledge of the facts. Whether a decision is correct is not self-evident. Based on what they know, different people may arrive at wildly different conclusions. Ask people about specific facts so that everyone is on the same page with respect to the information relevant to the issue at hand.

Finally, when there are no remaining visible disagreements, a decision is made. The clock start ticking. Even if someone silently disagrees with the decision, the work has to be done. Whoever has been assigned tasks is responsible for finishing them. Any past disagreements or objections are considered to be irrelevant and should not be allowed as justification for missing milestones. Only new events that may affect the outcome should be monitored and escalated, such as an employee unable to perform a task because of unforeseen technical challenges, or scheduling conflicts.

There will be situations where a decision has to be made even if some people (or even a majority) has clear, open disagreements. But the protocol remains the same. Every decision is made by the person who has the ultimate authority bestowed by the organization to make such decisions. And so regardless of their dissent, everyone else is obligated to follow the decision.

Why should it be that way? Well, the reason is that the manager is the person with the ultimate responsibility for the success or failure of the work. And they have the right to make a decision that everyone disagrees with, as long as they are fully accountable for the outcome of that decision. [In real life, of course, managers find scapegoats all the time.] Employees should reconcile themselves to the decision or quit if the decision is totally unacceptable (decisions seldom fall into this second category).

What if the employee, instead of not quitting, decides not to follow a “dictatorial” decision and does what he thinks is best? You may think that all he has to do is assume the responsibility for the outcome. After all, results are what matter and, if things go well, all is usually forgiven. Right?

Unfortunately, failure is always a possible scenario. And when that employee fails, he also takes his co-workers down with him. And few organizations have the patience for a manager who was hands-off and didn’t use his authority to steer the project on a correct course. Disaster for all.

And so the Golden Rule for all decisions is “Speak up, quit or forever hold your peace.” Anything else is an invitation for failure.

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Are We Safer By Abolishing Rules?

Posted on June 14, 2010 by Krishna

Jurgen Appelo writes:

In a Dutch article titled “Traffic is safer without rules” traffic expert Hans Monderman explained that the flow of traffic at an intersection can increase, while at the same time casualty rates decrease, when all traffic lights and road signs are removed. The reason is that, in a situation without rules or guidance, people feel compelled to take responsibility and to judge for themselves how to reach the other side safely and in one piece.

The cause of this paradox can be found in risk perception and false security. Remove the green traffic light (false security) and car drivers will not blindly go full throttle on the assumption that they have priority over everybody else. Wipe away the crosswalk and pedestrians will better watch out for any dangerous vehicles (increased risk perception). Monderman claimed that the number of accidents diminished, and traffic throughput increased, in all situations where this concept was introduced. The idea is called shared space, which entails that all participants in traffic are equal, and that they all have to watch out for each other. Nobody can assume priority over others.

Read the whole thing. Jurgen’s point is that rules can create a sense of false security and “sometimes it is necessary to abolish rules precisely to prevent people from blindly following them“. Unfortunately, in most current situations, people  never look towards removing some existing process to make things better. We hear about “tailoring” which sort of implies you could remove stuff, but talk to any process consultant and they start blinking very rapidly when you ask them what can be removed.

But here is the twist: The mistakes created at a traffic intersection are by those who violate the rules consciously or accidentally. If everyone only crossed a green light, we wouldn’t have accidents. The usual accidents are caused by a person trying to beat a red light or someone racing out before it is green, resulting in tragedy.

Rules, if followed properly, create a safer environment (with respect to their purpose) than no rules. They are also efficient in the short-term, avoiding the need to make the same decisions over and over again. But rules are not followed by all the people all the time, because of forgetfulness, lack of training, etc. And so you cannot entirely rely on them to protect you. For example, if an intersection has too many accidents, then it is not enough to insist that rules are already in place. Instead, maybe the green light should be delayed and the lights for each side should only be visible from that side to avoid cars jumping out early and to let some red-light-crossers pass without incident.

In a software environment, you can have rules about how people should check code in properly. But these rules are unreliable because the people for whom these rules are made for are inherently unreliable, like all human beings are. Some people are better than others at following rules, but sooner or later, everyone makes mistakes. So the rules have to be supplemented with the right source control tool (probably a distributed version control system), battery of unit tests, continuous integration testing and other checks. The more natural or automated the additional checks, the better. Leaving things to human frailties is not the answer.

The caveat is that rules implemented for one purpose may cause tension with those for another purpose. For example, rules for “bulletproof code” may conflict with rules for “first to market”. They need not, but most people find it difficult to balance conflicting priorities and sometimes the same people may not be in charge for both purposes. Think about how different departments within your organization (legal, marketing, finance) may each have their own set of rules which together make an incoherent mess.

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The Scourge of Silly Software Patents

Posted on June 13, 2010 by Krishna

I was about to link to a story about a major software company suing another for software patent violations which included such brilliant ideas as “System and method for providing and displaying a web page having an embedded menu“. Then I realized that this is not news at all. Collecting software patents for simple concepts and using them as threats seems to be the rage in the industry now.

What I still find hard to believe is how patents are granted for such trivial code. If you are working on any application, you will frequently encounter challenges (minor or major) in user interface, databases, business logic, etc. and would have wrote code to solve them. The problem is that most of us don’t have the time or opportunity to document these problems and solutions and apply for software patents. If we had, you or I might be the owners of some of these patents. Big companies have the resources to keep filing claims all day long

Does the Patent Office have people with enough competence to evaluate these patent claims properly? What is the process, beyond fighting a long, costly, sometimes ultimately futile legal battle, to say that a patent is meaningless and should be revoked? Can there be an independent agency (or agencies) that can act as a prosecutor for the public interest to evaluate software claims before anyone can apply to the Patent Office? Not an agency with veto or authorization power, but an impartial critical evaluator who can call out obvious false claims. Maybe such an agency can have people drawn from different companies and non-profit organizations. This is actually the job of the Patent Office, but apparently they don’t seem to be capable of doing it.

It also seems to me that beyond a certain point of growth, your company is likely to be unfairly targeted by competitors and fortune-hunters. All legal, of course, but that doesn’t help if you don’t have a huge pile of cash lying around. The only options are to keep your growth under the radar of your large competitor, or hoard or collect capital to manage such legal challenges. The latter is not even a sure option as you may still lose your lawsuit and have to shut down your company.

Also strange is how large companies are themselves targeted by obscure patent trolls (remember the RIM case), but there is no significant effort by them (as far as I know) to lobby Congress to restrict such practices. In a sense, software patents are continuing to justify the term “weapons of mass destruction” because although everyone knows how dangerous it is for patents to be used against them, they still want to own them so that they can use them against someone else. Bringing sanity to the situation will need serious leadership from the top players in the software industry.

It doesn’t look very optimistic at this point.

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The Reality of UI Test Automation

Posted on June 12, 2010 by Krishna

Michael Feathers explains how the reality of user interface test automation differs widely from the expectations:

The Dream

Janet comes into work in the morning and she sits down at her super-duper testing console. She presses a button and the testing system springs to life. The application comes up all at once across ten monitors. Cursors move, selections are made (silently) and tests run against the user interface magically, as if some eager set of ghost elves took control, mischievously burrowing through the nooks and crannies of the application, running scripts to completion, and making little notes whenever there is a failure. Janet sits back in her chair, waiting for the elves to report back to her. She stirs her coffee gently.

The Reality

Janet hasn’t gone home yet. It’s 2AM and she has to report completion of all her test cases at a meeting in the morning. She thinks she’s past the last configuration issue but she’s not sure. For the last hour, she’s been trying to make sure that a particular button is pressed at step 14 of her script, but quirky latency on the server is preventing it from happening consistently. Sadly, she has to run the script from the beginning each time. Oh, and five hours ago she discovered UI changes which invalidated 30% of the regression tests. Most of the changes were easy but she still has 12 cases to go and her 9AM meeting looms ahead of her.

It is a good article. For caveats, read the comments where there are some important counter-points.

I have seen many managers who sincerely, but wrongly, believe that UI test automation is going to save them effort and money. The problem is that you cannot automate everything and so you still need some level of manual testing in addition to the automated testing. So savings are less than you expect. If there is any change in the application, most of the time it will result in user interface changes. And so you have to change your tests repeatedly, whereas with manual testing, there is nothing to change except the testing itself.

Good automation testers are more expensive and harder to find than manual testers. An effective automation tester must know both development and testing. They should be able to go beyond simple record and playback and be able to write scripts and change generated test code. That requires understanding of logic and programming structure. At the same time, they should have the mindset of a tester so that they can create test cases that can discover bugs instead of mirroring the application code. This combination of skills is rare.

It is also not very clear whether UI test automation is worth doing if you have got your suite of unit tests and integration tests set up. Your unit tests should already cover scenarios with different kinds of data. UI test automation should therefore be for checking whether different input has an effect on other UI elements in the screen. And that is a function of how rich your UI is. So if you have very simple user interfaces, there is not much of a gain from automated testing.

As usual, it depends. If your application is in maintenance and is undergoing few changes, it may be worthwhile attempting to write some level of UI automation to test complex user interactions and workflows. It adds another layer of support for refactoring and bug fixes. It may be less useful during the early life cycle of the product when changes are coming fast.

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    Dreams of the Future

    Posted on June 11, 2010 by Krishna

    Robert Fortner reminds us that speech recognition is going nowhere:

    The accuracy of computer speech recognition flat-lined in 2001, before reaching human levels. The funding plug was pulled, but no funeral, no text-to-speech eulogy followed. Words never meant very much to computers—which made them ten times more error-prone than humans. Humans expected that computer understanding of language would lead to artificially intelligent machines, inevitably and quickly. But the mispredicted words of speech recognition have rewritten that narrative. We just haven’t recognized it yet.

    I think he is right about this. Speech recognition, despite increasingly powerful machines, has not come close to human accuracy levels. Beyond simple dictation and phone menus, I haven’t seen a worthwhile use of speech recognition. Having hit that wall, there is little chance of building a HAL 9000 or even a basic household robot to do your bidding.

    Take a look at the science fiction books and movies from 40-50 years back. It is funny to see how wrong they were. According to those predictions, by now, we would all be traveling in spaceships and visits to the moon or Mars would be a common thing. Of course, they got some items backward too, like the huge bulky computers that covered the entire length of rooms. Too much imagination and too little at the same time.

    There have been incredible advances, but many of them are so incremental that they are taken for granted. People mocked Apple for saying how “magical” the iPad was. But it and the iPad and the iPhone are truly magical when compared to what we had just 5 years ago. Powerful computers in your pocket, capable of all sorts of tasks and now even video phone conversations. Our expectations have become so high that the impossible fails to impress us. People are, in fact, outraged that the iPad didn’t have a camera!

    Also, old habits die hard. Although genetics have changed what we buy at the supermarket, we still cook and eat them the same way. Our clothes, our houses, our cars, etc. do not look fundamentally different from those made 50 years ago. Yes, they are made from better materials, or bigger or more economic, but they haven’t changed a lot.

    And while we have eliminated major problems (smallpox, polio), the ones that remain (cancer, Alzheimer’s) still threaten us. And while there have been advances (bullet trains, cheap air flights), they have been setbacks (Concorde, terrorism, higher fuel prices). The work that remains obscures the progress that has been made.

    But even if we solve the new problems, there will be new challenges. For example, assume that bioengineering finally helps us cure all diseases known to man, and so unless you get hit by a bus or jump off a cliff, you will now live to be 200. Great! But what do you do then about retirement? Spending 10-15 years in retirement becomes 130 years. And that is just getting started with all kinds of social and political problems such as old age social security, overpopulation, etc.

    The future is going to be an interesting ride!

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    Confusing Arrogance with Benevolence

    Posted on June 8, 2010 by Krishna

    In the way that only David Heinemeier Hansson can:

    Where to start?

    For people who complain about bad luck, it doesn’t really matter what a successful person is talking about. If the complainer has put in no or little effort, the complaints are just excuses. If they have put in a lot of effort, they are just trying to comfort themselves. People need to move on from failures and one way is to stop blaming themselves. Either way, what somebody else says is no concern to them. So you are not doing any favors to them.

    Success and failure are very relative. If you are employed in the software industry in the United States, you are more successful than 95% (or more) of the entire population of Planet Earth. Seriously, think about that! But if we are doing the comparison with someone, say, Steve Jobs, many (all?) of us, including David Hansson, would be miserable failures. To a significant extent (beyond absolute poverty and starvation), success or failure is a function of your mindset.

    In fact, the rat race in the 21st century would seem amazingly strange to most of our ancestors who cannot even imagine the advances that modern science has made. Modern medicine, fuel-powered travel, electricity, indoor plumbing: Luxuries compared to the past, but which we take for granted. So what is this success/failure thing? Made a few extra pieces of silver? Is that the definition of success?

    Or maybe success is about doing or making something that you wanted. Then it is about meeting your own need of achievement or happiness. It has nothing to do with other people. Isn’t it enough to be gracious and thankful for being able to achieve your dreams? Or is success defined in terms of proving yourself to other people? Pity for such a narrow viewpoint because the only thing left after achieving that is to hope that no one else will reach your level.

    To brag about how you reach where you are because of what you are is to diminish the effort of the co-workers, partners, customers, teachers, friends (open source contributors!) and relatives who helped you get there. Yes, you did your part, but they were instrumental (consciously or otherwise) in helping your work not get wasted.

    I am reminded of Jim’s Collins’s concept of Level 5 Leadership in his book “Good to Great”, where he says that good leaders look in the window (outwards) when searching for reasons for success and look in the mirror (inwards) when looking for causes of failure. And bad leaders do the opposite.

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