How the Mighty Fall

Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, is back with another book. Whereas Good to Great focused on what makes companies stand out, How the Mighty Fall inverts the equation by looking at the prime reasons for companies not making it.

The author tries to apply the same sound formula; i) gather a lot of scientific data, ii) discern the patterns, iii) write a good book about it.

Oh, how Jim Collins must have bewailed his fate when he found out there are many, many more ways to fail than to make it.

Good to Great comes back with solid and applicable advice. This made the book an instant hit among the target audience. And rightly so.

How the Mighty Fall's main contribution to understanding failure is the 5-phased lifecycle of a company:

• Hubris born of success; the company grows and starts to adopt an arrogance stance ("We won, because we are better")
  
• Undisciplined pursuit of more; growth becomes the mainstay and strategy (in business mainly the art of not doing something) is thrown out of the window
  
• Denial of risk and peril; warning indicators of imminent doom are ignored
  
• Grasping for salvation; doom is upon the company and anything which might reverse the situation is tried
  
• Capitulation to irrelevance or death; the company is sold or goes bankrupt
  

In other words, a very generic way of describing failure, which has mainly to do with character and culture. Given that there are so many ways to fail, the author falls back on safe ground by invoking Good to Great lessons. The one addition he makes is what you can read from any biography of a great person, like Lincoln or Churchill -- never give up, never give in.

If you are new to Jim Collins' works, skip this one and honor him by starting with Good to Great instead.

Why Maven is a Schmuck (part II)

This evening I had an excellent dinner with my friends Anthony and Erik, both of whom I hold in high esteem. There is nothing like a full-blown argument in good company and while we broached several topics, the one most noteworthy was that of Maven.

Anthony opened his broadside fire by claiming that a lot of the problems he saw in projects nowadays were Maven-related. I couldn't believe what I heard: a kindred spirit with sharp criticism on the untouchable Maven!

Maven adds considerable complexity by adding a layer of abstraction, obfuscating a lot of the dependency magic. Developers like Erik have no problem grasping the whole playing field, but the impact of this complexity on the team must not be underestimated. After all, team members must be facilitated by the tools, not obstructed or forced to learn more than they need to know, which in a way is what Maven imposes.

Anthony went so far as to claim that for large projects a dedicated Maven expert is required. I feel a lot of sympathy for that claim.

We concluded on the following regarding Maven's upsides:

• IDE support; it has solid support in setting up project structures -- think Eclipse and IDEA plugins which generate from the POM. With the right POM, you are up and running literally in minutes
  
• Reports; the built-in support of Maven for many types of reports is way more advanced than what its peers offer
  
• Intermediate product support; any project which produces intermediate JARs to be reused by other projects is bound to be a dependency nightmare, but Maven takes care of that mess best. Question is: aren't these the niche projects?
  

One thing we dealt with resolutely was the convention to split up a project in many sub-projects. A sub-project which does not result in its own deployable, nor is about to be reused in any way, does not deserve its own sub-project. The argument that future architecture splits are thus enabled is an academic train of thought which is rarely exercised in real life, though imposes heavy costs throughout the life cycle of the project. Keep it simple. Most projects belong in just one project folder.

At the end of the argument, both Anthony and I were more in favor of internalization of the dependencies (see my other article on Maven), while Erik remained firmly on the side of Maven dependency management.

For internalization, there is a price to pay though: internalization means that one developer goes through the pain of "getting it right", but after that it works for all other team members and for deployment to the target environments.

Excellent discussion of which I hope to see a lot more in the future.

The 5 Temptations of a CEO

The other day, Erik pushed a little book into my hand, called The 5 Temptations of a CEO.

The book is written in what is called the business fable style. Ie, storytelling as a way of teaching. More correctly, I would term it a parable, but I think the inventors of the term business fable wanted to steer clear of that one for its religious connotations.

The book follows the soul searching of the protagonist, a failing CEO, who not so much reverses his course, as identifies what the reasons for his failing are.

The author goes forth to summarize these failing under appealing titles:

• Status over Results; when personal agendas, career paths and status symbols prevail over what the company requires to subsist. Suddenly there is a lot of "I" in the team.
  
• Popularity over Accountability; when personal ties are more important than keeping people to their promises, thus holding them accountable. People slacken off and don't take their responsibilities serious anymore. Complacency sets in. This one also has to do with using your reports as allies and venting ground.
  
• Certainty over Clarity; the need for ever more information and procrastrination by a decision maker before making the call. In board game terms, I would call this Analysis Paralysis.
  
• Harmony over Conflict; if people refuse to slug their arguments out to prevent others from getting flushed, there will be a lot of suboptimal decisions. Those who can work the dynamic best by emotionally blackmailing the group hold sway
  
• Invulnerability over Trust; working to be one-up will push others to raise their defences as well. Any argument will now become one of status and survival, immediately tied to personal interests.
  

The text behind the headers is my own interpretation, which will show you that I concur with the author in his conclusions. Powerful stuff for anyone in a leadership position to consider.

And The Answer Was 42

I just started at 42. In true Hitchhiker's style, I got equipped with various handy galactic hiker equipment, first and foremost being the towel, of course. Most interesting was the six-volume literary bundle and the threat that "a verbal will be taken soon". Glups. I guess I have to cancel my appointments and get down to it.

Leaving Independent IP

As of September 1st, I will no longer be working as a full-time employee of Independent IP. I will still be involved in an advisory role.

The last three years have been a wild roller coaster ride and I am incredibly proud at the things we achieved together.

I stood at the cradle of little Fuga and saw it grow. I saw it take its first little steps by delivering content to webshops. I smugly noticed how the little kid outran all competing products, gained lots of compliments all around and was generally hailed as THE digital delivery solution for music. I watched the company change to accomodate the maturing of Fuga.

It is a kind of magic to nurture and grow a product like this. Very intensive, but very rewarding, more so if customers are happy and benefits are visible to everyone.

Professionally, when I started out on this venture I had lots of ideas how I wanted to develop the software, such as:

• test-driven development
  
• high test coverage
  
• development team works from home
  
• demanding recruitment criteria
  
• weekly release cycle (short sprints)
  
• clear split development / operations
  
• component-based design
  
• issue tracking
  
• integration / staging / production (similar to OTAP)
  
• proper testdata on staging
  
• testing by developers on integration
  
• testing by non-developers on staging
  
• external code reviews (I heartily recommend Springsource)
  
• process for functional requirements
  
• open culture where process and results can be challenged
  
• topic complexity; easy=text, medium=voice, hard=face-to-face
  
• utilize the strengths of team members to knit a tight team
  
• wrong people off the bus, right people on the bus (read Good to Great if you did not already!)
  

It is good to see that most of these ideas contributed to the success of the product. The value of all of these ideas, however, pales in the shadow of the wonderful and talented people whom I had the honor to serve with. It is a rare occasion to participate in a team that makes you feel like you can take on the world and yet that was exactly what I felt. For all of you, please allow Henry V to put into words my feelings:

And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

Fare well, my friends.

In Defence of Pokemon

Often, I hear parents complain about Pokemon. For those who do not know what they are, I am talking here about the fantasy world where humans and creatures called Pokemon coexist. The Pokemon can be domesticated and trained for battles by Human trainers. Pokemon are all strange looking creatures, often resembling some kind of animal and with a name that is almost always a mangling of some real words with makeup words, resulting in gibberish to the uninitiated.

I think these parents are misguided and are themselves turning into a curmudgeoning generation that mistakenly bemoans the lack of taste/ethos/skills in the young ones. Rings a bell? It should, since it is a recurring theme.

But to the point. The movies may not be your cup of tea, but most of the major literary themes can be found in there -- love, ambition, jealously, rivalry, sacrifice, courage, perseverance, duty etc. The Pokemon world is coherent enough to suck in the watcher and appeal to kids. The one movie that for me signifies this quite clearly is Lucario and the History of Mew, where Truth, Friendship, Sacrifice and Duty feature strongly. Please forgive your children for not watching De Avonden (talk about boring), but do not accuse them of having no taste.

Then there is the computer game on the Nintendo DS. In game terms it is a grind, full of micro-rewards, a very effective way to draw people into games. What I see in my own kids is that they learn to cope with setbacks, think about ways to succeed and persevere through it. The game is in english and they try very hard to understand the words, even picking up a number of them. I am amazed at how much they can already understand of the text. Besides the solo version, the game offers easy ways for groups of kids to hook up and play/trade/fight/chat together. Calling it anti-social just becase the means for conducting social traffic is not well understood is not doing it justice.

Finally, there is the trading card game. This strongly stirs the collecting fever that seems to be part of our genetic heritage. The cards of the game come in four varieties: common, uncommon, rare and ultra-rare. A tried & tested tier system that was first introduced by Magic the Gathering. I am surprised to see how easy markets are formed ad hoc and anywhere by groups of kids with their books, boxes and single cards stuffed in pockets. They deal easily and smoothly. Yes, there are some negatives, for example stealing and ripping off smaller kids, but more importantly, I see my own kids building up stamina, tolerance for trading away their own property, empathy for what the other kid wants (Theory of Mind anyone?) and developing savvy in what constitutes a good deal.

The last reason why I think Pokemon is not bad is deeply personal. My youngest son is suffering from Selective Mutism, which is often misunderstood by people to be shyness. It's hard to explain the affliction, but it is probably best described as a persistent, strongly rooted refusal to speak in certain situations with certain people. The affliction is curable by therapy and one way for kids to overcome Selective Mutism is, in clinical terms, if the price of persistant silence is higher than the social cost. Ever since my son has been engaged in trading Pokemon cards, he often found the cost of maintaining silence too high, and sometimes breaks that silence to fuel his trades. This blends in nicely with his therapy and has every appearance to speed up the process considerably. You can imagine that for this fact alone, the Pokemon movement has my undying gratitude.

Money for Nothing

Some 375 years ago, the Netherlands (then the United Provinces) just recovered from a bout of intensive fighting with the Spaniards. It had a lively trade, resulting in the Golden Era. This boosted the cash income for the upper class so much, that it desperately sought outlets, burning in the pockets of rich people. My fellow countrymen therefore developed an appetite for the beauty of the tulip; a rare item in limited supply. The insatiable appetite for exotic varieties turned into the first real economic bubble, as middle class speculators joined the fray and short selling (ie, gambling on price increases with borrowed money, effectively incurring double risk) was introduced. The history of this mania is described eloquently in the book Tulipomania.

The appeal of easy money has always been big. It is what any casino thrives on, and what makes Pyramid Schemes so successful in preying on the naive and gullible. Ratio is thrown out of the window in pursuit of the big fish and the fact that so many people join in only reinforces the herd mind that the mass is on to something.

Some of the appeals to people's lust for easy money is cleverly guised, such as The 4-Hour Workweek describes. And appeal it does -- how could it not? Gaining big money while doing (almost) nothing is so enticing, so seducing that it triggers the same mental area as it does when participating in bubbles, lotteries, casino games and pyramid schemes.

The author of The 4-Hour Workweek is obviously a gifted person -- and well aware of this fact given how he flaunts his accomplishments! -- which is a hurdle, inhibiting mass adoption of what is described in the book. To be system beater like the author is, is a rare gift. The author goes forth to describe how he delegates work to others in such a way that he gets relieved of all toil, except a couple of hours to keep things moving.

The 4-Hour Workweek is a bit more subtle in its negative effects however, when compared to the afore-mentioned economic phenonema, and it is all about added value. What the author works on is a mix of differences in price (the same argument used for outsourcing), his own considerable insights, available talent abroad and a non-transparant market. As opposed to outsourcing, which requires lots of actual work, experience and management to succeed with, the author adds no further value to the process, so builds up no competitive advantage whatsoever.

Let us just fantasize for a moment that Timothy Ferris' approach is broadly adopted. We have all these entrepeneurs, managers and experts whose sole aim is to minimize their working hours as soon as possible. What added value does that person build? What added value does the company build? What added value does society as a whole build? You can delegate your work away as much as you like, but there is always a downside to every upside. In this case, the downside is the loss of skills and experience and henceforth any competitive advantage that may have been wielded. A downside that is felt all the more if well-packaged parasitism becomes the norm. Just ask yourself how easy it could be for the delegatee to run away with your business.

Structural shortcuts to success are only for a few lucky or brave souls, and are by their very nature not intended for the masses. Contrary to popular belief, the best way to achieve your goal is still to identify it, set the parameters and work hard to make it happen. Like Erasmus said, Qui vitat molam, vitat farinam, or He who runs away from the mill runs away from the meal. In short: No pain, no gain.