#68-8/4/08: You Are Efficient Learning Machines!
You Are Efficient Learning Machines!
But what exactly have you learned?
Posted by Steven Cerri on Monday, August 4, 2008
Hello everyone!
This weekend gave me pause.
I once again realized how unique we human beings really are. We are just incredible learning machines. We absorb and learn like sponges. We live in this ocean of information, of patterns, of data, or chaos, and we absorb and work very diligently to deduce and hallucinate patterns. We find patterns everywhere.
And rest assured, learning requires patterns. No patterns equals white noise. White noise is no useful information. So our job, our nature is to cancel out the white noise in existence and find patterns. And once we find patterns we prioritize those patterns in terms of what is most useful to us.
We are “pattern identifiers extraordinare” and we should applaud ourselves. Our evolution, our genetic structure gives rise to an extraordinary pattern recognition machine, us!
It’s what led Newton to his three laws… patterns.
It’s what led Einstein to relativity… patterns.
It’s what led Heisenberg to his uncertainty principle… a pattern in the contradiction of patterns.
It’s what allowed us to evolve tools… patterns of successful hunting, building and social interaction, including war.
We are, bar none, the most efficient and effective, pattern recognition machine on this planet.
Sounds wonderful doesn’t it? Sounds like we ought to pat ourselves on our collective backs.
Well, not so fast.
In some respects it is our greatest strength. And in other ways it is our greatest weakness.
As the creator of the Matrix told Neo in the last film of the Matrix movie series… “It is at once your greatest strength and simultaneously your greatest weakness.”
This might be the perfect place for you to ask, “What the heck is Steven talking about?”
Well, let me explain.
We all know that pattern recognition is one of our strengths. Great. Applause please!
The weakness, if we can call it that, is that at a certain point in our life, that ability to learn and absorb is extremely critical, but we don’t have any “discernment”. In other words, we can’t distinguish what we learn as good or bad for us.
And what I’m talking about is your childhood. My childhood. The childhood of everyone.
Up until very, very recently, it was not a big deal. It was very important for children to learn, learn well, and learn quickly everything their parents could teach them. Because it meant survival. People didn’t get around much… think before airplanes. Parents had to raise their children to survive. To succeed. And to do so within the close proximity of where the parents, families, and the children lived.
Each son learned the profession of his father. Each daughter learned what to do as a woman from the mother. That was it. No body ventured much. If they did they were adventurers, conquers, etc. For the multitude of people, sticking close to home was it. Grow up like for father, grow up like your mother and you were successful and happy, whatever that meant in those times.
So learning everything you needed to know from your parents was good enough. The world changed slowly. Evolution only applied pressure on the fringes.
And then the world changed. The renaissance arrived. The industrial revolution came about. Flight became a reality. Medicine changed our world. Democracy changed how we saw ourselves in that world! Heaven forbid. People living together outside of marriage. Children being conceived just because one person wants to have a child. Goods and services being exchanged around the world. Traveling faster than the speed of sound. Living in outer space. Cell phones. Hip hop.
Soon it became clear that the following statement was true; “There is no way parents can prepare their children for the world the children will live in because the world the children will live in will be so different from the world in which the parents grew up that the teaching of the parents will no longer apply. But old habits, old genetic codes, are hard to break.
So here’s the deal. Those of us living now were raised by parents who could not conceive of the world in which we now live. They attempted to teach us, since we are all such good sponges. But what they taught us, to a large extent, was good for them. Probably not so good for us. But we still learned it. And now the question is, is what they taught you still good for you?
Here is an example.
Think about your concept of authority. How do you respond to authority figures? Policemen? Your boss? The President of the United States? A government official? Are these your own responses or are they the responses you were taught by your parents? Or by others in your life who had a great influence on you when you were young? Can you even answer those questions? Can you even tell the difference between what you were given in your youth and how you could behave now?
Odds are, your responses are not your own… they are the responses of your parents. The best way to say it is that your responses to authority are those that were given to you when your were growing up, very young. And you are still using them now.
They influence how your respond at work. They influence how your respond to your boss. They influence how you manage other people. They influence how you deal with people across the oceans. It’s all driven by what you learned, as a great sponge, when you were a child. Are those patterns you learned way back then still serving you… or not.
Is it time to change? Is it time to be different? Is what your parents and others taught you long ago, still applicable now, or does it all need to be updated? Where you prepared to live and function in “their world” or the world in which you find yourself now.
We are very efficient learning machines. Perhaps too efficient. If you could learn just what you needed to make you successful now, what would that look like? What would you need to learn? And could you? Would you? How would it be different from what you leaned back then?
Look in the mirror. Ask yourself, “Am I behaving in a way that advances my career” or “Am I behaving in a way that is a reflection of what I learned as a child that might not be so useful today?”
Nine times of out ten, for most people, the answer is the latter.
Be well,
Steven Cerri
“What would it be like to be as successful with people as you are with your technology?” Steven trains, coaches, and facilitates engineers and technical managers to BE the answer to that question. More information can be found at the:http://stevencerri.com/index.php/Home/index/
Copyright©2008 STCerri International and Steven Cerri. You are free to pass this information on to others and to reproduce it. If you reproduce it in whole or part please give attribution to Steven Cerri. Thank you.
Posted by Steven Cerri on 08/04 at 10:50 PM (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
#67-7/28/08: How Technical Should A Manager Be?
How Technical Should A Manager Be?
Should a technical manager be a technical expert?
Posted by Steven Cerri on Monday, July 28, 2008
Hello everyone!
There seems to be an on-going debate about how technical an engineering manager ought to be.
Some say that any manager worth his or her weight in salt has to understand the technology they’re managing well enough to actually have answers and be capable of doing some of the work themselves.
Others say that any manager worth his or her weight in salt doesn’t have to understand the technology. They just have to know how to “facilitate” the technologists who are the experts in the technology.
So who’s right? What’s the answer?
And the answer is: Neither is right? Or to put it another way: Both are wrong!
An example of the first answer is Bill Gates. It’s pretty clear that Bill Gates was up on most of the technology in Microsoft. By all accounts he was capable of doing a good deal of the technical work performed by the technologists in the company. Obviously he couldn’t because there was only one of him, but he was capable.
Because Microsoft was so successful, many come to the erroneous conclusion that Microsoft was successful because Bill Gates was at the helm. They conclude that because Microsoft was so successful and Bill was such a technologist, there must be a causal relationship here.
Not so. Bill only had this influence when Microsoft was small. The reason Microsoft became a powerhouse and was so successful was because it had a monopoly, not because Bill was a geek. The CEO of Microsoft would have had to have been a rock to drive Microsoft into the ground, at least up until recently when it finally got some competition. So Bill Gates is not a valid nor good example of how technical a manager has to be in order to be successful. The causal relationship in the success of Microsoft is not with Bill Gates but with it’s lack of competition.
If you want to read in interesting article that erroneously supports the idea that the technical Bill Gates made Microsoft successful, then read the article titled “How Hard Could It Be? Glory Days”, by Joel Spolsky. The article appears in Inc. Magazine, dated July 1, 2008.
In it, Joel talks about when he was a young Program Manager at Microsoft and had to give a presentation to Bill Gates. Joel wrote a specification and had to run the specification by Bill Gates. Joel talks glowingly about how Bill actually read his spec and how this was a testament to Bill’s technical prowess. Joel’s bottom line conclusion by the end of the article is that a good technical manager must be technically savvy. The more technically savvy the better. And as far as Joel is concerned, the Bill Gates he presented to was extremely technically savvy and therefore Bill represented the epitome of good management.
And of course, this myth persists still. People still believe that Microsoft was successful because Bill, the ultimate CEO-geek, was at the helm.
I don’t think so. This is not management. This is self-aggrandizement.
At the opposite extreme are those managers who don’t know anything about technology and therefore manage to drive their teams in the wrong direction. This usually happens when managers attempt to make decisions when they don’t have the minimal technical knowledge to make intelligent decisions.
I know plenty of managers who think that because they know management they can manage any technical team. Their position is that because they can manage, they think they can take any number of highly technical people, in any technology, and turn them into a successful, high performance team. Their fond of saying, “I don’t need to be the technical expert. I know how to manage technology and therefore I can manage any technical team. These are the managers who say that their role is to “facilitate” the team. They don’t need to know the technology because they are really only “facilitators”.
I don’t think so. This is not management. This is self-deception.
So what is the right answer? How technical should a manager of technical people be?
The answer, Einstein famously said, is, “Just enough but no more”.
Actually, when Einstein was asked how simple things should be made, he responded, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler.”
The same applies here. How technical should a technical manager be, “as technical as necessary, but not one bit more”.
So exactly how technical is “as technical as necessary?”
Technology is changing rapidly. In fact, so rapidly that few people can keep up with it for more than a decade. In fact, keeping up with technological advances for several decades is very difficult. The kids coming out of college have the latest knowledge and it’s only good for 5 to 10 years at the most, unless it basic technical and engineering knowledge they’ve been trained in.
So the technical managers’ job is not to have the latest technical knowledge. It’s not to know how to do the work that his or her direct reports are doing.
Here is the way I look at it. When I’m managing a team, my goal is to give my direct reports as much independent latitude as possible and no more. That means that each person is treated differently and each person gets a certain amount of independence, depending upon their expertise, and the situation. My goal it to keep them from failing. Put positively, my goal is to help them to be successful.
The metaphor I use is that my job is to keep them from “falling off the cliff” and yet, I want them to get close to the cliff. Getting close to the cliff means that they are pushing the boundaries of their own capabilities. It means that they are learning. But I don’t want them to fall off the cliff and fail.
Therefore, my job is to know “where the edge of the cliff is.” My job is to know when my direct reports are heading for disaster. That’s as technically savvy as I need to be. My job is to know when my direct reports are making technically sound decisions, but operationally poor ones. That means they and we are all close to falling off the edge of the cliff.
That doesn’t require that I have 100% technical knowledge. It requires that I have a combination of technical knowledge, interpersonal communication skills, and an ability to integrate facts as well as unrealized potentials. It means that I have to be able to integrate the known and the unknown in a model that can be projected into the future.
Instead of looking for managers that are technically savvy or for managers who can facilitate, we ought to be looking for managers who can integrate what they know about the technology and what they know about their team and what they know about the environment and be able to use their frontal lobes (where decisions are projected into the future) in a way that they can make sound decisions.
If you want to really understand how this is done just compare and contrast Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Bill Gates is smart but he doesn’t project unknowns into the future well. Just notice how Microsoft delayed entry into the Internet because Bill was so technically savvy he was sure he knew what was up. In fact, a great majority of the success Microsoft has experienced has been the result of its monopoly.
Now look at Steve Jobs. Apple, with it’s small market share, has been projecting far in advance of the current state. And all with a CEO who is not a geek. Go figure!
The primary requirement for managers is not to be able to “do”, but to be able to “see’.
The technical manager must constantly ask himself or herself, “what do I need to know and understand in order to point my technical experts into the future I see?”
Ask and answer that question consistently and often and you will be just technical enough.
Be well,
Steven Cerri
“What would it be like to be as successful with people as you are with your technology?” Steven trains, coaches, and facilitates engineers and technical managers to BE the answer to that question. More information can be found at the:http://stevencerri.com/index.php/Home/index/
Copyright©2008 STCerri International and Steven Cerri. You are free to pass this information on to others and to reproduce it. If you reproduce it in whole or part please give attribution to Steven Cerri. Thank you.
Posted by Steven Cerri on 07/28 at 06:41 PM (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
#66-7/21/08: On The Shoulders Of Giants!
On The Shoulders Of Giants!
Can you think your way through management?
Posted by Steven Cerri on Monday, July 21, 2008
Hello everyone!
How does science progress? On the shoulders of giants, so the saying goes.
Those of you who have taken my classes have heard me say that for the typical engineer, management is a new career. That’s my saying.
You’ve also heard that science progresses on the shoulders of the giants who have come before us. All knowledge builds on the foundations of the past. Algebra is the foundation for the calculus which is the foundation for differential equations. We must understand one level before we can understand the next. And so it goes… until things get stuck.
Yes, stuck. In fact, science doesn’t move in nice progressive steps up the ladder of knowledge. Nor does it move in chaotic fashion. Science advances in logical, incremental steps with each level using the previous level as foundation, until progress can no longer be made. And then, a completely new way of looking at the world must often emerge. If science continues to rest on the known knowledge as it’s foundation for the next step, it will ultimately fail to model the world.
Therefore, for progress to ultimately be made, science must embrace that which has never been seen before. It must embrace a totally new way of understanding the world and it must abandon, to varying degrees, that which came before.
This has happened and is happening with relativity, as one example. Einstein developed the general and special theories of relativity. That worked well enough until it didn’t. Then we got quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle. Those theories worked well enough until they didn’t and now we are seemingly moving toward string theory as one possible alternative.
So what does this have to do with engineering, engineers, and management. Well, it’s exactly the same process. As an engineer you think you can “think” your way through management just as you “think” your way through technical challenges. But the process of management is as different from engineering as quantum mechanics is from relativity. And whatever theories, rules, processes, and strategies you use to solve the engineering issues, I can guarantee you they will not work in the arena of management.
In fact, engineering is as certain as relativity at predicting the future. Management is as uncertain as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle at predicting the future.
The question is, which way of being in the world can you live with?
Be well,
Steven Cerri
“What would it be like to be as successful with people as you are with your technology?” Steven trains, coaches, and facilitates engineers and technical managers to BE the answer to that question. More information can be found at the:http://stevencerri.com/index.php/Home/index/
Copyright©2008 STCerri International and Steven Cerri. You are free to pass this information on to others and to reproduce it. If you reproduce it in whole or part please give attribution to Steven Cerri. Thank you.
Posted by Steven Cerri on 07/21 at 09:34 PM (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink