Toxic Management Culture

Al Pacino as Tony Montana

A toxic management culture is a set of behaviors, attitudes, and values that create a negative and harmful work environment for employees. Toxic managers are often abusive, manipulative, dishonest, unethical, incompetent, or indifferent to the well-being of their subordinates. They may use fear, intimidation, humiliation, micromanagement, favoritism, scapegoating, gaslighting, or other tactics to control, exploit, or undermine their employees. A toxic management culture can also be characterized by a lack of communication, feedback, recognition, support, trust, transparency, accountability, or collaboration among managers and employees. Continue reading

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Faster Horses

Faster HorsesThis article at Ars Technica about Microsoft’s continued failure in emerging non-Windows-centric markets is a prime illustration of a pattern that should seem familiar to anyone who has followed the technology business for any length of time.  A company is innovative, rises to the top, sets the standard for all to follow, but then loses its supremacy rather rapidly, and becomes just another company.  The cause of its failure are the very things that made the company strong.  They do everything right, get lauded by all the business and technology rags for their brilliant management, and then just a few years later, are seen as losers with terrible management. Continue reading

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Mediocrity Rules or “Why does enterprise software suck?”

green screenAs our society becomes more and more digital, more connected, and all of us become more comfortable with technology, the stark contrast that we see between our digital personal lives and the wasteland that we encounter at work is growing.  We social network on Facebook and Twitter, we share pictures with family and friends on Flickr, and through email we all write to one another far more often than we wrote letters to one another twenty years ago. It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the software we use in our personal lives is easier and more pleasant to use than anything we have to interact with at the office.

Why is enterprise software so shitty?

The short answer is that enterprise software is, and has always been, bought and sold by people who never have to actually use it.  Years ago when I was working for a major vendor of enterprise systems and applications software, I was tasked with providing a version of our massive ERP system that would run on the notebook computers of the time so that our company’s sales force could more easily demonstrate the software for customers. The commercial internet was in its infancy at the time, most companies did not have high speed connectivity if they had connectivity at all, and the only way to demo our products was for potential customers to travel to the “Solution Centers” that we had set up in a few locations around the world.

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Teaching Developers to Lie

cairo marketI have been at this for over twenty-five years and it amazes me that the same dysfunctional interactions between management and development teams continues to play itself out over and over again wherever I go.  It never fails.  Management asks for an estimate and development sandbags.  What then follows is a negotiation that has all the honesty of a B-movie Cairo street market argument between a merchant and a customer.  I almost expect one side or the other to exclaim, “You’re keeling me! Have mercy, I have two wives and nine children to feed!”

As if the actual time and cost for the engineering, testing, and documenting of a piece of software can be haggled over like the price of a bag of dates.  And as if the actual time and cost for the engineering and testing of a piece of software can been known before it is completed.  That’s the dirty little secret, never openly admitted by developers and never fully understood by management. Yet we all know these following truths:

  1. Software is always late, or
  2. Software always sucks, or
  3. Software is always late and always sucks.

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