Four words to eliminate from your vocabulary
are good, bad, right,
and wrong.
No, I'm not promoting rampant immorality, abandonment of your ethical
code, or abolishment of truth, righteousness, and the American way.
What I want people to
do is to avoid using these as categories, into
which they file ideas so that later on they know which ones to pay
attention to and which to ignore.
Take, for example, last week's
column,
which suggested non-IT business managers might benefit from Agile's
way of organizing work around generalists, rather than the more usual
reliance on coordinating multiple specialists.
Some of my
correspondents interpreted the column as saying
generalists are good, specialists are bad, or that the right way to
organize work is around generalists; the wrong way is around
specialists.
When it comes to
generalists and specialists, or just about any other
decision you might make, the only absolute wrong is making decisions
... about anything, not just work design ... as a matter of reflex,
habit, or any other variation of failing to think things through.
Small businesses
don't rely on generalists because the owner thought,
"Hmmm ... if I rely on generalists we'll be more flexible, and everyone
will have more fun, too." They rely on generalists because they can't
afford to hire someone who has the skills to properly perform every
piece of work that has to get done.
So when the time
comes to update the brochure, the owner looks around
and decides, "Gertie at the reception desk knows MS Office pretty well.
Based on how she dresses, she has decent taste. She can write in
complete sentences. And when the phone isn't ringing she isn't always
working on something else. I'll ask her to squeeze it into her
schedule."
The same owner, in a
company ten times larger, deciding it's time to
take marketing more seriously, hires a full-time marketing professional.
In a company that's
another ten times larger, the full-time marketing
professional becomes the Marketing Director, and hires full-time
copywriters, graphics professionals, web designers, and so on. Before
you know it the level of specialization is such that the PHP specialist
and CSS specialist are fighting turf wars.
(Separate subject but
it fits here: Turf wars, in case you aren't
aware of this, are of two types. When there's less work than there are
people to do it, a turf war means everyone claims the work as their own.
When there's more work than there are people to do it, everyone claims
approval authority while insisting the work itself is Someone Else's
Problem. Thought you'd like to know.)
When you subdivide
work among increasingly narrow specialties, you're
organizing the work functionally, accepting the additional management
overhead needed to orchestrate it so handoffs are smooth and the results
fit together when everyone is done.
As a general rule,
work organized around specialists is optimized for
high throughput and low unit costs. It's capacity and scalability --
what factories are for.
That isn't the only
reason businesses hire specialists. Another
reason: It's a skill the entire company depends on. If you're a
property/casualty insurance company, for example, most of your
profitability depends on how well your actuaries model risk, and how
accurately your underwriters assign individual applicants to the right
risk category.
This use of
specialists is quite different from reflexive
specialization. It is, in fact, the essence of a practice, where work is
usually optimized for excellence (flexibility, customization,
innovation, and the presence of high-value features). The specialist is
the practitioner, often surrounded by a group of supporting generalists
whose jobs are loosely defined as "keeping the specialist busy with
high-margin work."
Lawyers are an
excellent example, surrounded as they are by
administrative assistants, clerks, and paralegals who keep everything
organized and take care of the more mechanical aspects of the legal
profession.
Which makes a great
deal of sense. This sort of specialist is
expensive due to the law of supply and demand, which means their idle
time costs more than anyone else's idle time.
And as they give your
company a competitive advantage, the better
yours are compared to your competitors, the more business you win. This
means the high-value specialists you want are always in short supply,
even if there are plenty looking for work.
It also means you
shouldn't entirely eliminate good and bad from your
vocabulary after all. Winning business from your competitors is an
example of why.
With few exceptions,
it's good.
