Change of command

A change of program leadership is a critical time that can provide a catalyst for increased performance or leave a project adrift. A leadership change can result from a reorganization, a forced resignation due to poor performance, or a leader moving to a new opportunity. A successful management change will be be crisp, the new leader quickly communicates plans and priorities, and gets the focus on execution. All too often, I have seen leadership changes turn into long planning processes that invariably lead to loss of momentum, organizational angst, and an inward focus.

The military provides an excellent example for an effective change of leadership. The typical ceremony consists of:

• reading of new Commanding Officer's (CO) orders
• new CO states "I relieve you, Sir."
• the old CO states "I stand relieved."
• salutes and passing the colors
• speeches including the new CO laying out his goals and priorities

The new CO will have spent time before the ceremony inspecting the unit's personnel, plans, and execution. The result is a unit that receives new leadership, maintains operational tempo, and the personnel remain engaged. The new CO hits the ground running and any new goals and priorities are unambiguously adopted by the organization. A video documenting a typical Change of Command ceremony is embedded at the end of this post. Notice the passing of the colors to symbolize the passing of authority, the new CO's speech that establishes continuity with the past and expresses his priorities moving forward, and the new CO's superior expressing his confidence in the new leader. There is no question who is in charge and what the plan is going forward.

Strive to take on new responsibilities aggressively and quickly by following a similar yet less formal process. I begin by understanding the current team's culture, plans, execution strategy, personnel, and challenges. This is followed by the rapid formulation of a comprehensive plan developed iteratively with the new team and a plan rollout where frank and open discussion to obtain broad based buy-in and expose weaknesses. All plans contain strengths and weaknesses. The leader’s job is to make sure all the weaknesses are identified and the plan optimizes for obtaining the highest results while limiting the negative aspects. I have yet to encounter a team that will not get on board when leadership clearly explains the plan while acknowledging its deficiencies along with explaining the mitigation strategies.

An effective change of command will put you in charge, energize your team, and lay a foundation for effective long term execution.

The Main Thing

"The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing."
     -- Jim Barksdale

Jim Barksdale gave the best speech I have ever heard at a company gathering in 2005. His speech provided tenets for success based on lessons learned from running successful companies like Netscape and McCaw Cellular. His delivery featured his famous folksy style and drove illustrated his points using stories from the heady Netscape years. His main point was summarized by saying, “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.” I have always found the statement useful in bringing direction and focus to planning and prioritization processes. A difficulty in efficiently reaching consensus is a sure sign the main thing has not been identified and agreed upon by a group.

Identifying and obtaining broad buy-in for the main thing brings alignment of effort, clarifies prioritization decisions, and reduces diversions on non-critical activities. Examples of main things for my teams over the last few years have been proving out a product concept, getting a carrier deal, and developing a 411 experience using the mobile data channel and the mobile screen. Now these were not concurrent and one would expect fewer main things in a three year period but an acquisition can lead to interesting adjustments. Identifying the main thing as it changed helped ensure the team quickly realigned to the new mission and remained committed to the project. Lower level teams often altered plans without waiting for guidance based on understanding leadership’s intent. Their decisions were usually the correct ones which enabled us to adjust quickly and make rapid progress without the need for extensive planning sessions. The process became more bottom’s up with the upper management levels ensuring the lower level team plans aligned with the overall mission and offering feedback when adjustments were required.

The main thing is directly related to schwerpunkt concept discussed in the previous post. I view the main thing as a strategic concept with a schwerpunkt acting to focus execution efforts on a milestone leading towards the main thing. To use a World War 2 analogy, Operation Cobra was a lightning strike by Gen. Bradley and the First US Army to break out of Normandy while the main thing was to liberate France and defeat the Third Reich. The schwerpunkt centered on a small 7000 yard corridor with strong air and artillery support. The massive use of 3000 aircraft, 1000 artillery pieces, and 2000 tanks brought intense focus on a single point where the opposition was weakest. The result was a breakout that allowed the allies to advance to the River Seine within a month. The 7000 ft. schwerpunkt of Operation Cobra was in support liberating France and served as a point of focus to align collective efforts, from General Bradley down to the individual foot soldiers, with the main thing.

What is your current organizations main thing? Do the folks around you have the same opinion? An organization that reaches consensus on the strategic and tactical objective will experience unity of action, increased initiative, and positive energy. A lack of alignment will usually be accompanied by multiple top priorities, overly optimistic and aggressive schedules, constantly shifting priorities, and long planning processes. Do not allow your organization to execute without a single, simple, concrete, strategic objective. Executing with a clearly identified main thing will give you a competitive advantage thanks to your increased efficiency and quick reaction to market changes.

Schwerpunkt

Everyone loves Free. And what is there not to love about the free software movement that has given us such awesome software products like Linux, Apache, and MySQL. The free software movement aims to increase computer user's freedom by providing complete access to software including the source code. Software engineers love it because they can modify the software to meet their needs as long as they adhere to the product licensing standards, which usually state the changes must be shared with the community. Thus, free in this case refers to freedom not necessarily no cost, though the software is often free of charge.

Volunteers write most open source software packages and work in loosely coupled fashion free of the typical hierarchical management structures found in corporations. These projects can be large software efforts with many contributors never meeting face to face yet the products tend to have high quality and advance very quickly. According to a report published by The Linux Foundation, Linux has over 1000 kernel developers, contains over 11.5 million lines of code, and averages 5.5 patches/hr. It is the largest distributed software project in the world.

This raises an interesting question: How can a team of loosely coordinated, volunteer software professionals work effectively to release high quality kernel versions every 2-3 months?

The internet clearly makes communication between members viable through the use of software tools (bug tracking, version control), communication (email, IM, chat), and networked infrastructure (build, web servers). Organizationally, standardization provides a basis for efficiently working together. The Linux kernel effort has defined standards for coding styles, bug submissions, patch submissions process, release processes, directory structure, and more. Standards serve the purpose to increase implicit communication and reduce the need for rich interpersonal communication.

Structurally, Linux is organized into nested subsystems where each subsystem has an owner, known as a maintainer. Maintainers obtain their positions through a strong trust system. They do not have absolute authority for the culture is based on technical merit, respect, and a community first mentality. Interestingly, Linux is driven more by bottoms up development efforts and informal design with a decided lack of documentation and project planning. In short, Linux is a meritocracy where the values are pragmatism not theory, code not talk, honesty, integrity, performance, and openness to name a few. This band of coders has created a world class operating system that represents a serious challenge for Microsoft and is used by companies like Google, Yahoo, and Amazon.

Which raises the question: What unites the Linux kernel development effort and drives it execute successfully?

Schwerpunkt.

Milan Vego explains in an excellent article the schwerpunkt concept comes from German strategic theory and was used by Clausewitz in his classic work On War. He defined it as a singular objective the “weight of effort” should be directed in order to suppress the enemy, such as the capital or a protecting army. The word in German can also mean emphasis. Schwerpunkt provides a unifying concept to allow for decentralization of tactical command without losing cohesion of effort. By World War 2, a German attack would have an overall schwerpunkt and each subordinate commander would select his own schwerpunkt in support of the larger effort. Subordinate commanders were given freedom to balance the commander’s intent with the need to seize the initiative and act faster than the opponent.

The Linux kernel development effort combines common values, standards, and loose coordination and organically unites the disparate developers through a common purpose. The Linux schwerpunkt is to provide an operating system owned by the community for all to use. There are countless objectives of those involved in developing and using Linux that push it to solving a myriad of problem. Yet all these individual objectives are united by the overarching project objective. The result is a fast moving software effort that exploits many opportunities ranging from embedded network routers for the home to massive server farms used in cloud computing.

A capable leader will establish a clear schwerpunkt and ensure every person thoroughly internalizes it. When accompanied with less direct control, the team will demonstrate increasing initiative, sense of ownership, and passion. How can you tell folks have internalized the objective? I like to ask in 1:1s and see what each person says. And it provides an opportunity to emphasize the objective in a setting conducive to follow-up questions. You may also notice individuals recommending actions based on the objective or stop doing activities that are no longer in alignment.

My question for you is: Got Schwerpunkt?