One can argue and make excuses for costly budget overruns and slips in production schedules, but there are no real excuses. By definition, a leader is responsible to deliver a product on time and on budget. In the military, it is the loss of life and materiel that indicates poor or missing leadership. In corporations, and industry in general, this is disastrous to investors.
So how do these poor, unqualified people get into top management jobs, even to the level of CEO? This is easily done. There are two basic types of individual
18The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli.
THE IMPACT OF POOR OR NONEXISTENT LEADERSHIP 169
approaches to getting to the top. The first type of individual is the one who enters his profession with the desire to excel at what he does. A person from this category begins to work and learn the technical details of the job. He enjoys the work, and soaks up the details of the job and everything related to it like a sponge. He takes pride in his work, makes improvements to the process he employs, and his skills increase dramatically over time. Then, as he becomes more expert, he goes one increment higher, maybe managing one to four others whose jobs he understands, so he can mentor these and teach them the way he was taught by his superiors. Such people always hope to have a great senior engineer as teacher.
The fact that one’s boss is a real hard case or tough to get along with may not be pleasant, but it is okay as long as there is something to learn. In my case, I have worked for some terrible guys; they were poor communicators and slow of wit. But, as long as they meant well, had the interests of the project at heart, and had my personal welfare and advancement in mind, even if misplaced in some way, I would endure the pain and suffering.
I had a boss once who wanted me to produce an operational scenario for a ground system, for which I was the systems engineer. Indeed, in this case I was thoroughly qualified, both functionally as a user and as the analyst, operator, and systems designer. Yet, no matter how hard I tried, he didn’t understand the archi- tecture of the operations scenario. It was a terrible experience, truly. It took me at least 20 versions, 40 ways of presenting it to him, until he began to understand; he finally approved it. A much older and very experienced fellow engineer gave me some advice that I had never thought of. He said, ‘‘Mike, try to understand your difficulties with him in terms of a communications and computer software problem.
He has a receiving rate of 16 bits per second, and one compiler. You transmit at 7.5 Kb/s, and you multiplex. It isn’t that he’s not smart; he’s just slow. If you want to make him happy, go away and think about the data rate you are going to use, and select a language for which he has a compiler.’’ My boss was a traditional, old-fashioned, no-nonsense American electrical engineer from the Midwest. I followed the advice my colleague gave me, and lo and behold, my boss was happy. In this process I had not only accomplished my objective, but over the terrible months of mental torture I had gained an insight and understanding into operations scenarios that I never had before. How absolutely important they are for certain methodologies and approaches to systems design.
12.11.1 Conquering the Organization
Another type of individual is the one who, upon employment, begins to study the organization like a military commander would study a tactical map. The objective of this individual is to identify the key positions in management, their occupants, and the strengths and weaknesses of each occupant. Then the individual marks out a route to the top, with intermediate steps to be achieved. This means, if possible, getting to the next higher position as fast as one can. There are many personal benefits in this approach. It means that there will be faster increases in salary and prestige and power, which to this type of individual mean more than expertise
in any one technical skill or the assurance of a well-designed, well-developed pro- duct. Moving up the chain of command requires lots of work and risk. This type usually does good work, but unfortunately just good enough to get by, because pro- filing becomes a time-consuming activity. Going to meetings, however unconnected to one’s work, and meeting important managers and ‘‘organizationally key commu- nicators’’ who know someone who knows someone is important in establishing good communications interfaces, ‘‘uttering the right noises,’’ and making friends with the powerful. The trouble with this type of individual is that few in this cate- gory are intelligent enough to pick up the technical, managerial, and leadership skills on their way up to the lofty management positions they wish to achieve to be useful to the company. The years they spend in organizational politics make them politicians and not engineers or scientists, managers or leaders.
Interestingly enough, as careful as the U.S. Army and the sister services are in their evaluations of officers to prevent this type of individual from rising into high positions, they often fail to prevent them from getting into the top ranks, where apprenticeship and experience are very important.
There are exceptional brains, of course, who simply absorb knowledge at such a rate that they do not need experience, but these are very rare. So if an organization acquires managers who skip rungs up the ladder, it is no wonder that sound plan- ning, organization, and execution of tasks and project are not present. This is most evident when employee morale is low, and when trust in management and from management down to the employee doesn’t exist. This lack of trust comes from a lack of communication, which is the result of a lack of good leadership. Good employees leave and the poor performers remain. The upper management, having bungled or failed to exercise proper authority in the interest of the project or com- pany, now resort to ‘‘consultants’’ to tell them what needs to be done. Consultants are very expensive, and are no guarantors of success. Some of the books that are written on management are really very good. However, many of the authors have little to no practical experience in hands-on management. It is, in many ways, the
‘‘teacher of responsibility’’ when a young soldier dies with his head on your lap because he failed to follow your orders, or because you as the commander made a mistake in judgment.
Positions of leadership?No! There are positions of management, and effective management requires leadership, but leadership is an attribute of the human char- acter. You can acquire positive leadership qualities, which can make you into a good leader by study, apprenticeship, and the practical exercise of its functions over a period of time, but it requires a quality of caring, and in Kant’s words, an understanding of duty. This word,duty, is almost sacred in its meaning and defini- tion. It is the driving motive of pure ethics. It has no likes and dislikes; it has only the obligation to produce the best effort for an agreed-to price. Those who dismiss this word from their minds are, according to Kant, unethical. That’s a heavy con- cept indeed.
THE IMPACT OF POOR OR NONEXISTENT LEADERSHIP 171
13 Management of Software Systems Development
Management is the hardest of all jobs to do well. This chapter encompasses some review, but also covers those key elements of management that are not discussed in the other chapters of this book. I try not to cover management subjects about which much has been written by some very outstanding authors and experts in the field.
A well-managed project reflects the abilities, character, and personality of the manager. And, a well-managed project is reflected in the quality of its product and by being on schedule, and on budget. Poor and downright bad management is easily identified because it fails to meet the criteria of good management: a quality product, on schedule, on budget, at low cost, with a highly motivated workforce possessing high morale.
The obligation of those in positions of management is to provide the best possible product at an agreed-to cost and within an agreed-to schedule to the sponsor or customer paying for the service or product. On the surface, it is an easy definition.
Management is a position of high responsibility, accountability, and authority.
Managers, from the smallest five-person team leader to the President of the United States, have the obligation to deliver to the customer the best possible product they can provide for the compensation they receive. The key philosophical idea here is obligation.
Without getting into the leadership aspects of management, the English words
‘‘obligation’’ and ‘‘self-respect’’ are rarely used in the context of management.
In his work,The Critique of Practical Reason,1Immanuel Kant presents the thesis of pure ethic as a categorical imperative of duty/obligation, which he asserts is an attribute of self-respect. This really means ‘‘the will to do what is good,’’ which is coupled tightly to the idea of responsibility. Briefly, therefore, self-respect is represented in the American phrase, ‘‘I have to look myself in the mirror in the morning,’’ implying that if I have no self-respect, I don’t like what I see. There are, of course, lots of managers who have no self-respect, and have no problem looking into the mirror in the morning; the workforce knows who they are.
The Cognitive Dynamics of Computer Science: Cost-Effective Large Scale Software Development, by Szabolcs Michael de Gyurky
Copyright#2006 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
1Immanuel Kant, Die Drei Kritiken, Alfred Kroner Varlag, 1975, Stuttgart Germany, Kritik der Praktischer Vernunft, page 243.
172