February 29, 2020

The Unicorn Project – Part 6

This week our book club talked about chapters 16-18.

Chapter 16

  • The CEO is prioritizing having employees share problems they’d like solved, choosing which ones to prioritize, and giving teams the time to solve them. These innovation centers are following Lean principles.
  • Geoff liked the notion of employee engagement and customer satisfaction not being optional. We’ve all had experiences where those things get deprioritized when the chips are down.
  • The author states that such internal innovations are crucial for a company to grow. Geoff asked whether in the US “growth” at this stage means the same thing, as it seems like the business model for most innovation is “get big and get bought.” Jameson said that Parts Unlimited is already an established company in this space; they’re not a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company.
  • Why can’t Steve fire Sarah? Sarah has the support of most of the Board, so if Steve fired her, the Board would reverse the decision.
  • The Innovation Council is explicitly cross-functional. Jameson suggested that maybe the department or team leads be on the council instead of an arbitrary number “50.”

Chapter 17

  • The Unicorn Project engineers were already allocated to other things in the company before this project started. We think that those positions should be backfilled, because it would be unwise to break up a performing team.
  • “Sarah could have been a force for good” — her aggressive personality is helpful so long as it’s you she’s backing up!
  • All of us were unfamiliar with the Hoare principle. The book describes it as two states: The system is so simple so it obviously has no bugs, or the system is so complex so it has no obvious bugs.
  • We had a chuckle at how Maxine reduces 2,000 lines of code to 50 lines of Clojure. Geoff pointed out that now she has to maintain that because they likely don’t have any other Clojure devs around. Jameson shared a similar story where a website was developed in a language that no one else had competency in, so it had to be rewritten (after the dev had left the company) to be more maintainable.
  • Returning to a theme in this book: Sarah has never led software projects. Leadership with no tech experience grapple with the struggles of such projects.
  • The Rebellion learns that because of these newfound efficiencies, they’re going to lay people off. Geoff said, “Yes! Companies would make so much more money without those needy, expensive humans!” Ideally, these people would be working on other important things (refocused work).
  • We discussed the concept presented in the book that cost-cutting is not a longer-term strategy.
  • Kirsten said, “Long term, we don’t want to manage our dependencies, we want to eliminate them.” Sure, Parts Unlimited has bloat, but any system of reasonable complexity has dependencies. Jameson said the structure being put in place will likely yield people self-ejecting because they want things to stay the same.
  • Core = central competencies of an org. Context = everything else companies need to operate (e.g., HR, email, cafeterias). Erik was a bit down on investing in Context (“standardized, managed down, and maybe even outsourced entirely”). Geoff grumbled about this, “All the oil in the machine that makes a company enjoyable becomes the first thing to be drained when things are tight.”
  • Geoff was pleased there was support for middle management. They are the interface between strategy and execution that keeps teams of teams working smoothly.
  • Posed to the group: Why do companies keep outsourcing work to cut costs when they know they’ll end up with something they can’t maintain afterward? The best solution we came up with is for someone to layout the long-term consequences of this short-term gain in terms the business can understand.
  • The Rebellion leaders are taking an axe to all these software systems, like HR. These are high-level decisions that are not trivial to shift. Why is this group making these calls instead of some business ops group? This is why you have a review process (like the TEP-LARB) so you make these decisions intentially.
  • Houston wondered if there was a different way to frame the argument for layoffs around the Context vs. Core concept.
  • Parts Unlimited wants to become a deliberately learning org. Geoff pondered how many companies actually do this instead of treating their employees like replaceable cogs. Jameson suggested pitching this learning mindset as an attractor and retainer of talent with a specific benefit laid out for the business. This adage came to mind: “What if we train them and they leave? What if we don’t train them and they stay?”
  • We found it amusing how the “spreadsheet jockeys” don’t understand how easy it is to gut some of these systems (like HR) to come up with these cost savings, yet they’re pitching this plan anyway.

Chapter 18

  • Sarah attempts to cut off the Innovation Council just as their forming and gaining traction. Sarah being Sarah, protecting the short-term.
  • Houston liked the blind voting technique for choosing which projects to execute for innovation. It solves the HPPO (highest-paid person’s opinion) problem.
  • The pitch meeting was over five hours, which would have been a slog. It’s good that it’s happening, though.