The three golden rules of successful management

2009-02-24T09:08:00.000-08:00

1) Avoid making decisions
Never decide anything. Ever.
Seriously - every decision provides the possibility to fail and to make a mistake.
You are personally responsible for any harm caused by your decisions and you'll be punished for any bad outcome.
On the other hand, if your decision turns out to be the right one then there will be no gratitude nor honor - at the end you're just doing the job you're paid for, right?

So why should you take such a risk?
There is a simple answer.
Don't.
Avoid making decisions like the plague.
You'll see it pays out.

When you need to decide something then just call in a meeting and let other people decide (see rule #3).
That way you always have someone else to blame.
No, even better: No one is personally responsible, but some steering group is.
So eventually nobody can be blamed.

2) Ignore follow-up costs
What really counts is only the current budget.
You got a once in a life time opportunity to invest into the development of a new project but it won't be ready within a year? Forget about it.
You have sustainable development in mind to produce a steady stream of income?
It's not worth it, for now it will only look like a big expense without any value.
Sustainable development is just a buzzword anyway, in practice all what matters is to save money now.

When your opinion is asked in a meeting then always vote for the quick & dirty option.
There is no need to worry about maintenance costs at all - if later suddenly and unexpected a maintenance hell comes to light then you probably got meanwhile promoted anyway.
Thanks to rule #1 no one can blame you either way - it was not your decision to do so, was it?

3) Network with like-minded
The one most important performance indicator at work is the number of meetings someone has to attend, we all know that.
It really does not matter at all if you can't show any productive results as long as you look busy rushing from one meeting to another.
Having this in mind, you can easily do a favor to your friends by inviting them to all your meetings.
They will thank you and paying it back by inviting you to their meetings.
This is a classic win-win situation and you can easily multiply the number of meeting participant in no time.
The more people the better the unbearable burden of making decisions can be split if no possible circumvention is in sight anymore.
There is by the way no domain competence required or of any advantage when attending a meeting - inviting people from a completely different field of activity is even better than having some domain expert because people from other areas will introduce completely new view points to the never ending discussions!

Conclusions
Sorry for the sarcasm but sadly this describes very well how many people in my company behave.
The interesting question is what can one do about this to change it?
I'll cover this in a follow-up post later on.

Confession of a leecher

2009-02-24T08:36:00.000-08:00

I have to admit that I've been a leecher for years, only consuming the internet without giving much in return.
It's time to give something back.
Being the ponderer I am, I'm not promising to write something here on a regular base.
However, every now and then when something comes to my mind I'll boil it down to a few lines and hope it might be of interest for someone else too.

Topics will reach from IT and programming over politics, management and psychology to every man and his dog or whatever interests me right now.
My bad English comes because I'm a German (this pretty much explains it I guess) - please excuse this.
So welcome everybody, make yourself comfortable and please leave comments and share your own thoughts!

Do IT simple

The three golden rules of successful management

Confession of a leecher