Management

Just as author Tom Segev relates that Ben-Gurion increasingly harked back to the episodes that shaped him in his earlier life, so too are these episodes more vivid to us than later ones. This would be fine and even impressive as a literary gambit, having the reader feel about Ben-Gurion’s life the way Ben-Gurion himself did, but at least for this reader it was somewhat disappointing in that it’s the later events ⁠— founding and leading the State of Israel ⁠— that we are reading for. But again, this too may be a literary achievement, suggesting that for the subject of this biography, it was the younger man’s experiences that were important ⁠— and that by extension this is the case for all lives. But I’m not sure that’s accurate; surely the ambitious younger Ben-Gurion would have been overjoyed at the eventual achievements of his later self.

It’s a strange complaint to make, but I feel this book wasn’t long enough; each of the many episodes, particularly the later more historic ones, I felt could have withstood more detail.

I was pleased to learn of Ben-Gurion’s erratic behavior and attitude towards his family, and of his penchant for travel and mild but somewhat constant womanizing, and his growing intellectualism alongside faddishness. Segev concludes that Ben-Gurion’s philosophical disposition is basically that of Anglo-American liberal; all to the good. Almost. The implication is that this temperate poise made him the wise indispensable man, but also open him to more exciting dead-end intellectual enthusiasms.

Friendships, sex, religious relations, despair ⁠— the richness of the subject matter’s life encourages in the reader a life in politics as it’s a life in full.

Entertainingly caustic albeit a tad ad nauseumly, Neil Postman’s famous book regales us with at least one important historical fact and one historical idea.

The fact: that before showbusiness, Americans were by far the world’s most literate, informed, engaged population, whereas today it must be said have a reputation abroad for ignorance.

The idea: that even while powerful technologies are mindless and agnostic, each nonetheless has its own nature that pushes society in particular directions. Postman argues mostly convincingly that print is healthy for society, television not.

Just like the self-help gurus pointing out that it’s better to totally goof off than do busywork because at least leisure doesn’t feel like work and thereby misguide the mind, so Postman prefers straight-up entertainment shows like Hart to Hart to those that pretend to inform like 60 Minutes.

Now, the book was written in 1985 and is about TV; the big question is what Postman would have thought of the Web and social media. He does write that the potential influence of computers is overrated, which reminds us that nobody’s infallible (which does undermine the book’s credibility, so kudos on the publishers of later editions in not cutting out these throwaway few words).

Surely I’ve read The Man with the Golden Gun before, given that this mangy old paperback has been on my bookshelves since 2006? Perhaps, but I remember nothing.

Some scenes that seem somewhat vivid for now:

• The middle: James Bond meets kind-hearted Tiffy, the manageress of a Jamaican cathouse, before finding Scaramanga, who promptly does something totally awful
• The end: As Scaramanga’s temporary assistant, James Bond machinates and maneuvers around the underfunded hotel that the assassin is building
• The beginning: M ruminates over his decision to send Bond after Scaramanga

Right now the best part seems to me M’s internal monologue after a brainwashed James Bond, back in London after imprisonment in Russia, fails to assassinate him at his desk (a glass screen plummeting down from the ceiling to block the poison Bond has fired, foreshadowing the spirit of gadgetry to come in the movies).

In wake of this domestic excitement, as M calls it, he decides to send Bond after Scaramanga, who has killed some British agents, figuring the Double-O will either succeed in killing the fellow and thereby redeem himself, or conveniently die trying.

Chief of Staff Bill Tanner thinks this cold-hearted, as Scaramanga is so dangerous. M takes a solitary lunch at his club Blades, troubled presumably over both the event and his subsequent decision, but we are only privy to his thoughts once on the ride back to the office, when he reassures himself that his decision really was wise ⁠— indeed he almost can’t believe that his instant instinctual choice stands up so well to scrutiny. This is our glimpse at leadership. The rest of the novel ⁠— and the entire series ⁠— is our exploration of manliness.

In the movie we lose this brief inner turmoil from M, but we gain a more impressive (though not sufficiently so) Scaramanga in Christopher Lee, who is as suave as Fleming’s assassin is lunky; and we get fabulous Thailand instead of, yet again, Fleming’s Jamaica. To make a long story very short, we’re rather missing Nick Nack.

It Doesn’t Have to be Crazy at Work may be a business book but, like Peter Drucker’s best, I found it profound. We can forget that business itself is profound, the intended happy medium of most modern collective endeavor. For authors Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, founders of the Basecamp organizational management software-as-a-service, business is the expression of philosophy. They counsel practicing it humanely, moderately and deliberately.

They establish authority with a first shock, an obvious idea you’ve almost certainly not thought of yourself: that a company should be considered a product, its employees the users. In fact this is a framing analogy for the entire book; like Nietzsche’s preface to Beyond Good and Evil positing that we suppose Truth be a woman, it throws wide open our thinking on our subject.

Another shock: they advise eschewing goals: “You don’t need something fake to do something real.” How shatteringly refreshing is that! Especially since my previous book was John Doerr’s Measure What Matters, which is all about goals. I had been excited for the Doerr book, but couldn’t finish it due to the sterile-speak of the case studies, which ⁠— unwarrantedly perhaps ⁠— undercut my faith in the concept. In contrast, Fried and DHH have the clear bracing style of successful coding entrepreneurs. This helps overcome the natural worry that going goal-less means a descent into hedonic anarchy, instead what they seek is appropriateness and authenticity. That said, I wonder whether this is the idea they’re most likely to step back from in future.

A third novelty seems downright crazy: they advocate not selling licenses by the seat, but by the organization. “It doesn’t matter if you have 5 employees, 50, 500, or 5,000 ⁠— it’s still just $99/month total. You can’t pay us more than that.” They leave this money on the table as part of deliberately designing the culture of their company (see the first idea); they don’t want to be dependent on a few large customers, nor create an internal cultural schism between serving small business and enterprise.

Similarly, they decided to stop accepting checks for payment just because it was a hassle, which did lose them some customers. This however is a less controversial notion, akin to Apple removing older technologies from new products despite their still being in widespread use and absorbing the hue and cry.

The authors also believe that the American-inspired work ethic of long hours is counterproductive and inhumane. Having worked at an Israeli software services giant I’m in agreement here too; at Amdocs if you went home after a mere 9 hours in the office you were perceived to be not pulling your weight (and, in my case, eventually laid off). And when I was temporarily attached to teams for international business trips, it seemed that all the team leaders were either divorced or in the process of becoming so.

Some of the authors’ values only apply to their particular industry. They make a claim for good enough rather than perfectionism ⁠— this is fine when your product is web-based software where one can churn out a fix at little cost, but not for many other high-value products such as cars.

In my small own small way I already practice much of what the authors preach. My only qualm is that while I love their philosophy, I’ve never much liked Basecamp itself.

I stopped reading John Doerr’s Measure What Matters some halfway through because I couldn’t take any more of the stilted archaic business-speak in the case studies. And because the ideas presented ⁠— barring the occasional mild insight ⁠— seemed too obvious.

The two insights of value to me: that sub-goals, what Doerr terms the Key Objectives (I think ⁠— I still have to keep referring back ⁠— nope, it’s Key Results), should be an artful balance between quality and quantity. And that despite the importance of results tying in to objectives and thereby be set top-down, some lassitude should be allowed for results to be set bottom-up.

The book could have benefited from having its ideas framed in terms of the Tao, since everything here is in complementary pairs ⁠— even the duality of overarching goal and its constellation of objectives. Instead we have an acronym OKR that still didn’t help me remember the two simple constituent terms.

Although the simple thesis gets repeated interminably, nonetheless it’s a nice one: that Steve Jobs’s greatness stems muchly from his constant becoming, constant learning, constant trying to overcome himself (hence the title, which can be read as descriptive).

It’s great to be in his company, which you feel you are, as one of the authors was himself repeatedly so for decades.

One thing new to me was Pixar’s role in maturing Jobs; we don’t often read about who and what shaped the shaper.

In what seems a common pattern, Jony Ive started early, eschewing the liberal education of say Oxbridge, instead selecting the most renowned college in the field in which he was already winning prizes: industrial design. And this great achiever of our times grew up under the happy and mighty influence of his father, an educator who rose to prominence due to character and a drive to bring design literacy to British education.

The bulk of this book about Ive constitutes one of the stronger, more detailed histories we have of Apple itself, told mainly from the perspective of the IDg, the internal design group he leads. We learn for instance that in order to meet Steve Jobs’ deadline for creating the iMac ⁠— the first product upon Jobs’ return and which revived the company ⁠— they needed to streamline the product process by making the files of the design software interoperable with those of the manufacturing software.

Someone says Ive is even less replaceable at Apple than Jobs. This isn’t quite fair because Jobs worked to make himself replaceable. Let’s hope Ive does as well.

The editor of Cult of Mac relates the origins and the methods of Jony Ive, one of the handful of people who influence life for almost all the rest of us. (I‘m writing this on an iPhone; the woman next to me is using an iPad, the third a MacBook). Many products are popular, but these aggressively push the edge of what’s possible and set a standard of excellence that raise our expectations generally.

We open with a foray into Sir Jony’s background, and the happy and mighty influence of his father, an educator who rose to prominence due to character and a drive to bring design literacy to British education.

In what seems a common pattern, this great achiever starts early, eschewing the liberal education of say Oxbridge, selecting instead the most renowned college in the field in which he is already winning prizes ⁠— industrial design.

We are then given a solid account of Ive’s pre-Apple career, showing that the prodigy continued to be a happy and successful team player. There were no big setbacks in his life, just stellar performance from a young age.

The bulk of the book is not just about Jony Ive, but rather constitutes one of the stronger, more detailed histories we have of Apple itself, mainly a history of the products from the perspective of the IDg, the internal design group long run by Ive.

To create the iMac ⁠— the first product upon Jobs’s return and which relaunched Apple on its unprecedented run ⁠— the company had to forge new processes. Specifically, they needed to streamline the product process, making the software used for design interoperable with that used for manufacturing.

There is also mention of how on the logistics side Tim Cook developed an integrated system in order to eliminate inventory ⁠— it hooked into retailers on one end (this was before Apple had its own stores) all the way to suppliers on the other.

And there is one important warning regarding process: Before Jobs returned, during Bad Apple if you will, there was “a well-structured process” that nonetheless led to uninspired and even ill-conceived products.

If there is one element of the product process that we can learn from this portrait of the artist, it is the importance of modelling. To a large extent, modelling is the process. Therefore the question of product excellence is largely a question of modelling excellence. For non-product fields of endeavor, this would probably correspond ta simulations and rehearsals.

(The exception to this law of human endeavour can be found in some of the work of some of the greatest of artists. A Frank Lloyd Wright, say, when sketching Fallingwater in one afternoon while the client was heading over; or a Marlon Brando refusing to rehearse or even learn his lines. These are arguably singular performances coming after decades of mastering then remastering their respective crafts, and no doubt weeks of rumination and reflection on the project ⁠— ie, mental modelling?)

Steve Jobs figures prominently in the book, obviously. Perhaps most awe-inspiring is his decision upon returning to Apple to kill the Newton, despite it being well-loved by many and a burgeoning platform in itself. Jobs has famously said he’s most proud of what Apple has said No to rather than what it said Yes to; the Newton decision illustrates this cryptic, seemingly almost nihilistic statement. Because surely it’s easy to say Yes to exciting things, but how much harder is it to say No to something that people are already invested in. This decision-making is, obviously, among the most important responsibilities of the CEO.

Towards the end of the book, someone is quoted as saying that Ive is even less replaceable at Apple than Jobs. This isn’t quite fair because Jobs worked to make himself replaceable. Well, let’s hope Ive does as well.

Engagingly written albeit disappointingly somewhat thin, the useful angle here is how Apple differs from conventional wisdom.

Secrecy, even internally, is paramount; it helps alleviate internal politics and keep people focused. There is little internal promotion, taking seriously the Peter Principle. Unlike the rest of Silicon Valley, perks are minimal; working at Apple is the perk.

A product of its time (2012) and of the author’s lack of access, the book is marred at the end by pessimistic obsession with Apple’s viability post-Jobs, but is nonetheless ultimately worth reading because it does convey an impression of what Apple is like.

INSIDE APPLE

Well I was expecting more from this book; beginning it, I was very pleased at how engagingly written it is, after the last book by the BPM-D people. I was looking for information about the Apple process, but there wasn’t much detail about the ANPP than what I’d seen in the blurbs, which was a bit disappointing.

Nonetheless, one thing I did pick up that is important regarding process, even if it’s higher-level and more perhaps a value than a process, is secrecy. He does a good job of laying that out, the uniqueness and strangeness and centrality of it.

But you can tell he had little access. Nobody has told him how it came about, if this is a Jobs thing, if’s been organic or deliberate.

As the author notes, it flies in the face of conventional wisdom, and indeed in the business blah-blah of the BPM-D guys. There is no transparency, and yet the BPM-D guys extoll transparency as the main virtue of process.

Nobody I’ve come across goes into much detail in squaring this circle. But as I write this it seems perhaps obvious. First, what do we really mean by transparency? On one hand, he points out that the human mind has a hard time with secrecy. On the other, it seems impractical and impossible that everybody knows everything. Perhaps transparency is shorthand for managed transparency, ie, each person can access the information she or he needs to know. Well, to refine further, transparency probably also means a propensity towards sharing more rather than less information; tell all unless proscribed, rather than tell nothing unless prescribed.

The book proposes at least one good reason for opacity: suppression of fiefdoms, since nobody knows what anybody else is doing and can’t fight over turf they don’t know about. That is somewhat persuasive. It probably also requires fear and respect of your superiors, that you don’t question their judgment if you are not selected to be involved in some new skunkworks.

This is process, of course, just a different process.

There are a couple of other interesting contrarian uniquenesses. There is apparently no culture of promotion, people stay pretty much where they are initially hired. The author marvels at this, wondering whether perhaps it isn’t a good thing, avoiding the Peter Principle. And maybe too helping avoiding politics: the things you fight over aren’t promotions but hot or not-hot projects.

And it is the precise opposite of the foosball culture; it is fulfilling, not fun. The rewards are intrinsic to the work: seeing people choose products you worked on. This of course is how it should be. Though few businesses can realize it.

It would have been wonderful to get more insight into how much company and process design Steve Jobs thought about; perhaps it was something he was able to set and forget, moving on to think about the products set to flow through the system, which of course is what the system was intended for.

It also seems that there is not too much emphasis on process ⁠— nor should there be really, it becomes the shape of the environment in which you work. But Apple seems to be inherently agile, valueing people over process.

How amazing that must be, surrounded by people whom you have faith are probably at least as amazing as you are, and you believe you are pretty amazing yourself.

The book is marred towards the end by a repetitive focus on how the company is going to do without Steve Jobs. This discussion goes nowhere; rather, the question is posed again and again. And suddenly we are shown that the author is actually a bit of a hater, jumping on trivialities to presume things will tank. It’s a rather ugly end to the book and shows the smallness of thinking of most people, even elite tech journalists like this one. Could he not form an opinion of this central question of whether Apple would succeed?

It would also have been great to get a bit of a glimpse of the operations mind of Tim Cook, some example of how one product in modern Apple has gone from start to finish. How valuable would that be? But nothing.

And more amazingness. Steve Jobs never seemed to want for anything ⁠— you pick up the phone and call anyone. You acquire the best people to build the things you think should be built. This sense of, not entitlement exactly, more a sense of right, a confidence, permeates the company. You work with Apple, you do things the Apple way, because they have no reason to believe it is not the best way. And if it is not the best way, though the chances are it is, they will pivot.

This sense of right must be earned to be authentic; that seems to be an invisible hand woven into the human soul. Do the work ⁠— whatever that means ⁠— and earn the rights.

And what can work mean? What was Steve Jobs’ work? Deciding, it seems, for the most part. Staying abreast. Staying hungry.

How much of our human work is deciding? What informs decisions? Self-respect. Self-belief. Immersion.

 ⁠— 

Internal let alone external secrecy is a management method. It prevents politics, keeps people focused on their work, helps things not get leaked.

The place is not fun. It is fulfilling. People work hard and don’t get promoted. the money is normal. the reward is the geek’s reward: seeing people choose your product cos it’s the best

people seldom leave

p85

what if focusing on promotion is all wrong? let people stick with their perfect job

Enlarging on their idea that 80–85% of process improvements come from just 15–20% of processes, the authors argue that organizations must institutionalize BPM like other now-standard departments such as accounting and human resources.

They explain the mission of such a department (effective organization-wide process improvement), the goals (to determine which processes to focus on and which techniques to use for each) and the method (a series of rubrics for evaluating).

Important though the book clearly is in the field, for me it was a slog; the prose is not crisp and the examples seem vapid – though it’s likely that for a reader more versed in the practice they would come more alive. The book does get more quotable and unabashedly enthusiastic towards the end.

Perhaps a manager would have nodded along with excitement; despite in a voracious phase for this topic, I found myself nodding off. it was a slog that did pick up slightly towards the end, with some quotable quotes about the value of process. It seemed very airy-fairy and jargony for much of the time; maybe it just needed to be crispened up by a stylist; I didn’t slow down enough to check, to try to rewrite a paragraph to see if it could be made enjoyable.

What this is is an argument that BPM is still relevant, despite the presumption that the reader considers it old hat. They present their Value-Driven BPM as a new more holistic way to do it, a process in itself about how to do process. They believe it should be institutionalized, as entrenched in the organization as accounting or HR. And moreover they prescribe what this new office of PoPM (Process of Process Management) should do.

I’m persuaded that they have a lot of experience as consultants, though the examples are pretty vague and thin. There is no deep case study though there are a number of superficial ones.

They believe in the past organizations have not known which processes to focus on and which techniques to use for each process. They believe they are conveying a method for setting and selecting these. The method seemed a bit contrived but I suppose that doesn’t even matter so much as the fact of being aware that a method is required to direct these things. I was struck as I was reading whether this is just an over-complication of the Theory of Constraints, which they never measure. In some ways it amplifies ToC, but in others it seems to contradict it: the decision on which processes to improve go beyond whether this is the organization’s constraint. It’s things such as costs, appropriateness and whatnot. This is all very nice but I wonder if it’s wrong, if the simpleness of ToC trumps all: focus all on the constraint. They are trying to get in that direction with their value-based perspective, ie, make sure you know the value of working on a process before doing so, but they nuance it. Maybe they are right, since not every constraint may necessarily be addressable with process work, in which case it would be dumb to throw process work impotently at the constraint. ToC might say to forget everything else and focus on the constraint, and if it’s not process related, then stop doing process-related stuff. But perhaps that’s not realistic, an organization needs to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time, so some process work elsewhere than on the constraint seems feasible, even if it’s not the company’s top priority; it’s part of ongoing work and should continue.

What a contrast to the style of Bruce Silver, who is much more a writer. And the density and clarity of the Real-Life BPMN guys (though to be fair their topic is more geared to me).

The book is still maybe ultimately an amplification of their application of the 80/20 rule to process: how to figure out which are the 20%.

I was suprised that implementation/execution engines are pratically unmentioned, except in some figures and tables. They are not unaware and unsavvy re tech, mentioning social media as a new force for process. But the possible transformative effect of BPMN-powered enterprise software doesn’t seem that interesting to them. They see the field as building a repository that stays useful and relevant. To me this seems like one more use for the engine approach: you can be darn sure your models are up-to-date and relevant otherwise your enterprise operating system isn’t going to function as you need it to.

But this in itself was I think valuable to me, how the culture of this field has traditionally been practiced even at its best.

One major idea for them, probably the A-side if 80/20 is their B-side, is transparency. They argue that transparency is the top benefit of process work, and it is transparency that then goes on to provide the benefits of coordination, trust, insight, etc. I’m not sure I fully agree, it seems more that it concretizes the abstract, makes it possible to look at the emergent property of people’s actions as a thing itself, and that the nature of this particular abstraction is what’s required to most effectively manipulate and improve an organization’s activities. Maybe transparency is just a shorthand way of saying that but it has further connotations, moral ones perhaps, that seem not relevant here.

Finally, the book introduced me to the concept of pre-existing reference models for various industries ⁠— recipes basically. I’d already had this idea as part of the vision, but they showed me it’s been around a while in non-executive form as part of the ecosystem around ARIS, which I also learned is the behemoth in this space apparently ⁠— around since 1970. Interestingly, there didnt seem to be a framework for construction.

So yeah, worthwhile and necessary reading for me, but among the least fun in a while. If I wasn’t voracious about this topic right now I would have flung it aside as a badly-written business book.

It jogged my thinking re Apple, that it must be a fanatically process-oriented company, probably the secret sauce that nobody ever asks them about. And indeed, around since the Mac, and probably a large part of what SJ brought back: the ANPP, the Apple New Product Process. Cook is the CEO after all, not Ive.

Notes

27
Name processes from customer perspective

Main benefit of bpm: transparency.

126
Repository is key and it must be functional/dynamic. Well we get that built in by being executable. The mission is herea

Boy oh boy this is a slog. Maybe it’s because it’s blah-blah or maybe beause written for actual real managers and all these things may inspire them and mean something to them.

The initial 20% of the book seems to be about defining their terms, that they arent just talking about BPM but their own very special great new BPM.

Then half of the book seems dedicated to their process of deciding which processes to improve. Like an arcane Theory of Constraints, all these rubrics to determine which to go at, hammering away at their fundamental 80/20 rule. I wondered though if it doesn’t just all boil down to Theory of Constraints. Perhaps though it’s difficult to determine the constraint from a process perspective, ie, which process is causing the most acute problem?

I guess they are trying to define what a problem is. For Goldratt it was throughput, pure and simple. But I guess they want to decide against goals, which may be more complicated. But are they?

141
Imagine using an environment like YouTube to exhcange business process models and narrated presentations. Instead of just posting videos, companies could post process models representing their best business practices or other interestesting process ideas.

142
Ah, finally, Internyet of Thyings, perhaps something that I don’t know / can see the importance of. Well not much.

145
The importance of repositories. Now I understand the emphasis on the modeller: this is the bit that enterprises have cared about up to now, the repository of diagrams. Well we’re going to share them. Open source business. This goes beyond BPMN. KPI, value trees, etc.

146
Challenge is using the models, not building them. That is solved by executable BPMN ⁠— it’s in constant real use.

166
Collections of industry models

173
The actual big incumbent here is ARIS. Accessible repository seems the big business not execution

Main benefit of bpm: transparency. For us this means ability to do smart mechanical Turk. Open up your tasks to anyone qualified. This is the final dream of the project. Been on my mind a long time. The How is swimming into focus. Requires an additional dimension to a task : taxonomy of skills. XPlace of the 21st century

188
transparency is the greatest aid to agility, ie, ability to respond to more stimuli and act with greater precision.

“Process is the abstraction that can manage the chaos of the new world ⁠— technology cannot do it alone.”

“Process is one of the chief competitive assets an organization can have.”

191
“Process is the abstraction that organizes and conquers the complexity of this new world.”

“The boundary between agility and order is where process lives.”

205
Fuse Wikipedia and Facebook with BPM for something new

With their years of experience as business process management consultants ⁠— and now vendors ⁠— the authors choose “real-life” as their approach, explicating their own methodology for delivering BPM projects. This book serves as invaluable guidance for newer practitioners.

With their years of experience as business process management consultants, the authors choose “real-life” as their approach, tamping down the reader’s giddiness that BPMN – business process modelling and notation – is the panacea for all workplace software. “Since 2007, we have used BPMN extensively and often, and you can believe that we have suffered terribly!”

For a start, they recommend a 3-tier approach to models: strategic, functional/operational and technical/executable – that is, one model for managers (Steve Krug’s “Don’t make me think!”), one for involved staffers, and one for the programmers who’ll realize the BPM project. Having three models of the same process is already a slight deflation: it breaks the cherished precept of DRY – don’t repeat yourself. The authors’ defence is that the strategic model is unlikely to change very often anyway. Nonetheless, this still leaves the redundancy of having both a functional and operational model and maintaining each. Their response, I think is that the functional/operational model can be mutated into a technical/executable one by adding the process engine as a pool in itself (fig 4.13), and each person having a lane within that pool as well as their own separate lane. “Our judgment is that this approach is the only practical way to align business and IT in a BPMN process model,” they write. That is some hard-won wisdom. They note that this approach has the advantage of hiding every process from the process engineer except those of the workflow engine, continuing the effort to keep mental bandwidth down for all involved by only showing them what they need. They have a simple diagram, the Camunda House, which shows the relationship among these.

They also introduce a 2nd group of 3: gurus, followers and unbelievers within the organization that will be BPM’d, and that these should become in-house.

There’s a strong introduction to the perhaps trickier CMMN, which they recommend using only as much as needed, bringing over to BPMN as much as possible.

I’d like to have seen a discussion of where the BPMN cut-off point might be, ie, at what scale of activities is it clearly worthwhile bringing in BPMN and its associated overhead rather than using a more conventional programming method. They profess to answer this question at 7.2.4, but the discussion seems inadequate (indeed, I forgot it was there). But yes, they do say “high number of repetitions.” What is high? 1000s, presumably. 10,000s? Another “essential” advantage, and I agree: “visibility”: execution of the process is not buried deep in the software; it is rendered visible. “Withough the engine, IT specialists have to embar on a quasi-archaeological search to unearth how the process was actually implemented.”

This is a very valuable book in the field, written from someone who’s been in the trenches but also nonetheless has the wherewithal to step back and view the field.

But the book could probably have been twice as long. The topic of screens gets three paragraphs within section 4.4.4, which seems inadequate treatment given that screens is something every real-life BPM project is going to have.

Chapter 2 is a good overview of the language itself. Chapter 1 is an introduction to BPM and some guidelines for implementing it (introduce it in steps that “yield a practical, measurable benefit that justifies the time and effort”!). This, it seems to me, could be expanded to include Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints: the single step chosen is the recognized systemic constraint. In 8.1 the authors suggest S.M.A.R.T. – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Timely.

There is no fluff here. It’s one of those books where I feel I can immediately return to the beginning and read it through again because it’s all too much to absorb the first time (indeed, that’s what I’m doing a bit now to write this). Indeed, returning to their Chapter 1, which outlines their methodology, it’s clear that chapter 3, the heart of the book, is an explication of their framework. They do announce this, but you can forget it when lost in the weeds. Hence the utility of a second pass-through of the book.

What is scary and that the authors don’t shy away from is that modeling is judgment call – the same process can be modeled in many various ways, but it is experience that dictates just how and where to show the details (fig 7.6 cs 7.7). You’ve just got to get out there and start doing it.

This chatty, self-serving, very likeable book is arguably necessary reading today, now that the man has climbed to the pinnacle of life.

In buying the Commodore Hotel in midtown Manhattan, his first major success, he had to juggle getting the money from the bankers and permission from the city (though the book’s account glosses over the help he received from his father calling in favors). Each step forward with one party in the deal encouraged progress with another party. This iteration seems to me a fundamental part of the art of the deal: aiming higher than seems reasonable, bringing multiple parties to something they would never have come to otherwise, then inching forward by presenting progress with one party to another party to create confidence, iterating until everyone is aboard.

A must-read coda to the book is the July 2016 New Yorker article with the equally-billed ghostwriter Tony Schwartz wherein Schwartz expresses huge concern about the man he knows well.

Trump thinks for himself. His move as a young man to understand his relative strengths and join a club full of older men is what I mean by thinking; how many of us cannot break out of our little peer zone, permeated with the pathetic fallacy, unable to truly understand that others see things not as we see them, that what is commonplace to us (youth) is angel dust to others.

There is gentlemanly respect throughout for women, even if he didn’t necessarily live his life that way, I don’t know. This is how he chooses to portray himself in print at any rate, with decorum. That alone is worth something.

I’ve been listening to the Commentary Magazine podcast lately, enjoying John Podhoretz’s knowledgeable and intelligent monologues, even if regularly exasperated by their ideological blinkers. This week their discussion reeked of black swan events but they fumbled around for the logic that applies. It was obvious that none of the three speakers had read any Nassim Nicholas Taleb, otherwise they would have had the framework and could have moved on. That made them seem ignorant. Which makes you realize these books are seminal. Yes there are irritations, but perhaps these will fade from a more distant perspective. There are echoes here of the iconoclastic spirit of Nietzsche – can there be higher praise?

Talk about a dent in the universe! This classy Cold War tome cuts it open to demand space for a new thing: management. The universe complied.

It used to be that a book, to be worthy of the name, would claim supreme significance. Perhaps this disappeared with the Vietnam War, where the supreme society, the USA, began to harbor deep self-doubt. The Practice of Management, a classic by Peter F. Drucker, is from an earlier age: 1954. As such it’s peppered with references to the enemy, to Soviet Russia and Communism with a capital C. The practice of management, the book’s title, is therefore no less about business than saving civilization, enabling victory in the Cold War. And given that at least one reason for the USSR’s implosion is that it couldn’t compete economically, perhaps that indeed is what happened?

Sixty years on this newfangled thing, management, feels as much part of the landscape as say the fire engine. Drucker suggests it’s a profoundly Western practice in that its job is to question things, to be a systematic introspection into what the business is and should be. It’s also liberal in that it grows out of the idea that economic change can help social and even geopolitical change. He attempts to limit its scope to business rather than every field of endeavor, but I think over time that distinction has not held up; management is required regardless of whether profits are. (Nor it seems is the idea that it’s a Western thing, given the later dominance of the Japanese in the field.)

So it’s bracing stuff and supported by the content and style of the book, infused with confidence borne of expertise borne of experience, and with moral purpose. It has a stylistic edge, a swipe sometimes of causticness. Along with its scope and ambition, its style makes it feel like that rare thing, a real book, rather than a genre one, such as business or self-help.

Also the author’s confidence and authority is so supreme that it’s sufficient to allow for humility. We are way beyond believing that the author knows whereof he speaks at least as much as anyone else in the world. There are also real insights ⁠— the type you think are obvious but you never thought of until now. That management is about looking up, not down. That staffs are a bad idea. Of the proper purview of business in society. Insights are taken from existing organizations where they succeed, from the Jesuits to the Soviets. Drucker focuses on the fundamental significance of planning, how indeed planning is in essence the job: setting what to do.

There are great examples of companies that arrived at managerial insights and redirected the company accordingly. ATT: They must serve everyone, even the unprofitable thinly-populated areas, or the government will cease tolerating their monopoly. Sears: Their customers in the future are not going to be the current but waning isolated midwestern farmers who ordered by catalog, but the future suburbanites who will drive to a big store.

My notes (though there is more to it than this, and I’ve missed many of them here because I was reading from my own personal perspective/crisis):

p44: Marketing + innovation + productivity = profit

p50: What exactly is the customer buying?

p93: “We advance to the extent that we can organize parts of production”

p133: A manager acts as a free man

p140: A manager’s role to subordinates is to provide assistance, not supervision

p276: Work is probably not best performed as its analyzed

p277: “The human being does individual motions poorly” [contrast with the current notion of breaking things into manageable next actions]. “It does not follow from the separation of planning and doing in the analysis of work that the planner and doer should be two different people.” Planning and doing are two parts of the same job, not separate jobs.

p279: Combine the divorce of planning from doing with the marriage of planner to doer.

The job:
- set objectives
- organize work
- motivate and communicate
- measure
- develop people

p343: “Being a manager is more like a parent or a teacher”