|
Reprinted from Keep the Joint Running.
|
"Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans."
- John Lennon |
My friend Larry Robbins died last Wednesday, apparently of karoshi. He was 52 years old.
Larry's death by overwork was self-inflicted. He was the sort of
person who constantly looked for what wasn't being done that he could
do. The universe being what it is, his attitude gave Larry an infinite
pile of work.
He figured if he just shoveled hard enough and well enough he could clear the pile.
Larry was driven by accomplishment, not by work/life balance. If you
worked for him, you needed to be driven by the need to accomplish too,
because like it or not, that's what you'd do: Produce more and better
work than you'd ever produced before.
I worked for Larry for several years, and we became close friends.
Later, in a different company that hired him to be their CIO, he became
a difficult client. Consultants should never consult for former
consultants. You can't win.
And so, after a year we agreed we had to choose between being friends and doing business together. Friendship won.
Before I left I asked what he'd learned from having left consulting
for an honest job. His answer surprised me: After more than a decade of
being a process consultant, designing "perfect" processes and making
them work for clients, he'd discovered that putting a good-enough
process in place and perfecting it one day and insight at a time worked
better.
What I admired second-most about Larry was that he never stopped learning.
What I admired most about him was this: In a conversation about
corporate, what headquarters ought to be doing but wasn't, and other
general griping about how the company should be run, Larry said, "Wait
a minute. We're all leaders of the company. Let's just do what we need
to do."
We're all leaders of the company. Every year since I've peeled back another layer of that statement. I'm not done yet.
That statement is why, in my book and seminars on project
management, I encourage participants to take responsibility for more
than "just" project completion - to take responsibility for success as
well, and to engage every member of the project team at that level, too.
The difference, in case it isn't clear, is that completion means you
produce all of the promised deliverables in forms that adhere to their
specifications ... say, a piece of working software. Success means the
business actually receives the intended benefits ... improved process
throughput, perhaps, or reduced unit costs if that's the plan.
The usual response, when I first present this perspective, is for
participants to ask how they can be held accountable for success when
they don't have the authority to make it happen, because, "Everyone
knows you have to match authority and responsibility."
Fair enough: Those companies that hire and lead poorly enough that
managers have to hold people accountable can only do so within their
areas of delegated authority.
I tell them what I think Larry would have said: That nobody has to
hold a leader accountable for anything, because leaders take
responsibility for getting the job done. If they don't have authority
they rely on their ability to persuade, and if they can't fully
persuade they do their best to influence.
That means a project team that's accountable for building software
should take responsibility for maximizing the likelihood of it being
put to productive use. This is quite different from the
all-too-frequent arguments between developers and business managers as
to whose fault it is that the software doesn't do what the business
needs.
More broadly it means asking where we each have leverage instead of
figuring out what prevents us from getting something important done.
It's a better way to look at leadership in an organization of any size,
whether your role is project manager, operational manager, executive,
or staff. Figure out:
I'm pretty sure that, or something like it, is what Larry meant when
he told his managers they were all leaders in the company. It was the
most important lesson in leadership I ever received.
Larry and I had our differences, among them wildly different
theological perspectives. We promised ourselves we'd explore them in
depth one day.
It appears we'll have to delay the conversation for awhile. If we have it, though, it will be a short conversation.
Because if we do, I'll have to acknowledge he was right.
Robert
Lewis is president of IT Catalysts, Inc., a consultancy focused on
improving IT organizational effectiveness and integration with the
enterprise. Contact him at
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
.
Copyright 2009, IS Survivor Publishing, all rights reserved.
Only registered users can write comments.
Please login or register. |
