James C. Liu's Weblog

Thursday August 26, 2004

Techies just don't understand Business

Geeks just don't Get the Lingo

Throughout college, I recall walking down to the other side of campus and talking to my Liberal Arts professors during office hours, and we'd try to get deep into analyzing some passage in a novel or essay. But in more than one case, my instructors would insinuate that I just didn't get it. They knew I was an Engineering major that was just taking their class to satisfy my general Ed requirements, and they'd tell me that the life and literature just weren't as simple as Engineers made it. Emotions aren't black or white, they'd say. And that to appreciate the Letters, Scientists need to escape the "box." Without thinking out of the "box," we wouldn't quite understand the human condition.

And I almost believed those criticisms. I had doubts as to whether I belonged in the Human Race. In my college youth, my Alienation was reinforced constantly. For example, I always pondered why those Liberal Artsie Fartsie guys could score on the cute members of the opposite gender. It wasn't until I completed grad school and was working overseas and drinking with a bunch of seasoned business guys in a bar that they all laughed at me. The project lead leaned over and gave me the facts straight up. He explained that Geeks dig Relativity, but Girls dig Relativism. That's why Engineers don't score in College. What I should have done was to be like him, and take some Poli-Sci and Philosophy classes, and walk around being anti-establishment and tell people I dig Nietzsche and Marxism. Later, with Berkeley credentials, I'd land some Director job and make a big salary managing a bunch of geeks. Oh, and BTW, to "think out of the box," humans need assistance - usually in the form of smoking a mild narcotic.

But if that was the path to success, then shouldn't I just blow this whole interest in Technology and go the way of my leaders? And to my surprise, my sage Project Lead vehemently told me, "Heck NO! We need you in case the customer has some real technical problems." :-)

Well, now, I understood. It was a vocabulary problem. It all made sense. Gee, how stupid I've been. I should have had shed the shorts, sneakers, let my hair grown long to put it into a pony tail, gotten a piercing and gone around bashing the Republican party and experimenting with various combusted herbs, while NOT inhaling. But that project manager did get one thing wrong. Berkeley credentials don't go very far in Business circles. It's the Stanford, Wharton, and MIT Sloan Biz school grads that get into Director/Veep positions. That's because Berkeley is a public school and they don't mandate curriculum that teaches students this management lingo. They also don't mandate taking courses in how to leverage others to do your work, sandbag, and communicate effectively to take credit for work we didn't do. And lastly, an esteemed colleague of mine, once a very well respected engineer, and now promoted to Director (someone who made the transition to management), explained to me that I need to learn how to talk to Execs. It's not as intuitive as you might think. The trick is to never start a talk at the ground level, but begin at the 30,000 ft level. And instead of dropping down over time to say 10,000 ft - NOPE - don't do that - Pull UP! Yes, start from 30,000 then PULL UP to 100,000 ft. Execs will really be impressed. They'll think, son you have vision!

As a Geek, I must admit I still harbour feelings that the management-style of content delivery seems superfluous, inefficient, and often times, data is lost in translation. But over the years, I've discovered, non-techies like high-level and non-specific/non-committal content with lots of colour and simple arrows that point here and there. They love jet-setting around on big travel budgets lugging super-thin laptops, with their PowerPoint or StarOffice Presentations displayed on a wall with the latest 3 lb Digital Projector. This is called being a "Player." Yepp. And we can't forget fine Corinthian Leather laptop case. But I digress. :-)

It shouldn't really matter what the mode of communications is in a tech company, right? If there's a business process problem and we talk about it face-to-face, or explain it in a clear email, or have just a plain old overhead slide with text, non-techies should be able to grock the primary gist, right? I prefer source code myself. With exception of lazy-techies who don't align curly braces, or zealots who use full 8-charater tabs to indent, it's hard to confuse what someone is saying with those irrefutable characters, semi-colons, and curly-braces in nice colours in a VIM, Xemacs, or other IDE Window.

And based on the substance of the discussion alone and not the delivery channel, our non-tech-leaders should be able to process the idea at both a wide enough and high enough level, but also understand the low-level consequences of their decisions. But my suppositions have proven incorrect. I've discovered that using Photoshop, Illustrator, StarOffice Draw or GIMP to add colours, 3D shadows to arrows, and nice fonts that follow Bezier curves -really- helps communicate ideas to some such folks. Granted, I've been somewhat slow-witted (i.e. stupid) at "management lingo." I've actually been taking it seriously when they squint at my proposals, and then shake their heads in disapproval and tell me they don't agree, and to go back and find more data to back it up. Actually, I've learned this really means "NO," by management, and it's a polite form requesting that I, "...please go away and don't come back." My apologies for being so dense!

I guess I'm just the stereotypical Engineer. I just don't get it. What I think is common sense and obvious, management sees completely differently. In the past, I use to start at base principles, like Micro-Economics inside the Envelope, and derive the entire supply/demand-time continuum equations, then use them to prove that my ideas would be correct. But getting non-techies to actually buy into such logic has been impossible because I have yet to have any of them be able to sit through and understand any of my Eigenvalue solutions or Lagrangian Matrix derivations. So I've recently switched tactics and tried some rhetoric. Rather than telling the decision makers, "C'mon, you idiots, it's common sense," I've changed my delivery and tried to quote Shakespeare - "This to thine own self be true..." But that hasn't worked very effectively, either. I guess I just don't communicate effectively and there is no Management Lingo that expresses the Economic Eigenvalue solution to a boundary value Lagrangian problem that involves necessity and sufficiency. (yes, I took Mathematical micro and macro-Economics, taught by a Nobel Prize winning professor - and thank God it still counted as a "Liberal Arts" courses).

Thermodynamics of the Wealth of Tech Corporations

I have aptly coined this overhead introduced by Management Lingo - "Corporate Entropy." And some engineering and science neophytes might remember that Entropy has some association to "Chaos." But let me state that such a view is simplistic and inaccurate. Entropy can be quite orderly. In Heat Transfer, it is equivalent to the integral sum of the quotient of heat dissipated to the ambient environment divided by the current Temperature. They teach non-techies and high-schoolers that Entropy is Chaos, because the heat that's dissipated is often transferred to increasing molecular energy and momentum of the ambient air. This transfer happens in a purely dissipative mode and does no useful work except to make the molecules bounce around more chaotically. But as Einstein said, God does not play with dice, and what small minds think is Chaos is simply energy transfer to the ambient environment which makes the molecules more vigorous. Ironically, recapturing the lost heat, requires one to put much work into a system, and doing so, according to the second and third laws of Thermodynamics means you generate more Entropy.

Pop-tech-culture has coined a management lingo-ized version of the Three Law of Thermodynamics. 1. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. 2. There ain't no such thing as a Cheap Lunch, and 3. Don't waste time looking for a cheap lunch because the cost is always going up! But I get the feeling that non-techies think they need not be concerned by such silly Laws, because they "think out of the box."

But make no mistake, the Laws apply to everyone. Entropy often happens in Corporations, especially when non-techies think they can violate the Laws of Corporate Thermodynamics. We generate a lot of waste of resources running around making slideware and attending meetings and throwing around proposals. And in the end, Engineering must do a lot of work to get us back to where we were before the initial proposal. And Engineers tend to be less efficient at such communications.

I've often wondered why Business Thermodynamics would allow for such large Marketing organizations inside companies. There are some excellent Marketeers to be found and don't get me wrong, I believe in Marketing and support organizations as long as they prove effective over time and have valid data to back up their assertions. But it seems like an industry epidemic in techbiz. Why are there such large numbers of seemingly ineffectively deployed Marketing resources that generate a lot of Corporate Entropy? Well, according to the Laws of BizThermo, without lots of work by senior management to keep Marketing in line, there is a natural tendency in any corporations to degenerate over time into high-Entropy. This degeneration accelerates over time because of interactions with partner corporations. You see, let's assume that all corporations started out with only great Marketing folks who were very effective with no Entropy. But the moment any corporation grew to the point they hired more Marketing folks within whom there was one bad apple, then the degeneration of that corporation's Marketing would accelerate and it would also accelerate that of the partners. Why? Because that one marketing person would start to make lots of superfluous FUD and try to spread it to the engineers. Not wanting to hear this drivvel, they'd redirect this person to market somewhere else. Before long, the marketing reaches out to the partners and in order to handle the new volume of FUD, they hire more FUD marketeers, and so on and so on. Soon, all partners have large marketing divisions where the majority of employees in those groups are there to handle FUD only.

This isn't to say that Geeks don't cause lots of Corporate Entropy. Only, as mostly inwardly facing resources, they tend not to cause Corporate Entropy in their partners. But quite commonly, very, very, very, senior Engineers, some quite Distinguished in fact, can make very technically bad decisions that can really mess up a company. Luckily for most smoothly executing corporations, engineering organizations tend to submit themselves willingly to peer review by a wide geek audience, not consisting only of insiders or old-timers whom themselves may be subjective. The peer review is a small inefficiency that can introduce slight delays in ideas turning into shipping product, but usually, the technology and implementation are sound. And while Marketing gets a bad rap with engineers all the time, in truth, some engineering groups in companies produce some fairly buggy technology products that suffer major defects such as in stability, robustness, security, etc. But the Marketing groups are so good at executing that Marketing actually comes up with the brilliant strategies that might include market share monopolization, or leveraging ignorance of average consumers to fool millions of them into purchasing their products. One Pacific Northwest manufacturer has even taken the decision out of consumers hands by forcing pretty much all major PC vendors to ship with that manufacturer's software pre-bundled. Brilliant Marketing.

But, in general, many high level non-techies argue that Engineers don't see the whole business eco-system because we're too focused on the low level technology. Actually, I would tend to agree with such statements, but there are exceptions. Specifically, technology Business is a different beast and when a business hinges on selling complex high-end technology products to enterprises that make millions or billions of dollars per year relying on it, it's important for senior management to roll up their sleeves and learn about the guts of their business by asking tough technical questions and doing due diligence. Management-Lingo familiarity-only probably won't cut it when trying to optimize decisions. Afterall, the users and buyers of such enterprise high-tech products tend to have IQs significantly higher than the average population, and they tend to be very savvy with technology in order to succeed over their competitors. If a company can't deliver successfully and competitively on complex technology, then it might as well go after some low-margin consumer space and become a lowly reseller or distributor, or hope it can settle into some gov't sponsored monopoly and bilk the public out of monthly subscription fees.

More and more, the laws of Corporate Thermodynamics are looking like Business Darwinism - two approaches with differing theories converging on the same conclusion? This usually means that the projected consequences for corporations with too much Entropy are gloomy and techies and non-techies need to really take heed.

And for those former-techgeeks that have gone over to the dark-side, I like to use this analogy from intro Electrical Engineering. We can think of all the massive revenue from product sales like the current that can flow through a semi-conductor diode. From a high-level, business execution is like the switch that turns on a voltage spike. If the company executes correctly, it's like flipping the switch and the revenues or current will flow. But if the company doesn't execute, no current flows.

But the test of Management isn't in giving the order to throw the switch or not; it's in solving problems such as throwing the switch and nothing happening. And that's where the semi-conductor diode can seem impenetrable to any amount of electric current. And the problem may be as simple as a tiny voltage differential that causes the bias to remain below a certain band-gap voltage. What the moral of the analogy says is that Non-technical Management, in addition to the Big Picture, needs to really see the fine details of their strategy to understand the impedance to making money because they've forgotten some infinitesimal engineering detail or process. Otherwise, they may try to implement what they think is a fix, but all they will do is generate a lot of Corporate Entropy trying to get their way.

There is a science and set of mathematical tools that enable decision makers to make sound economic decisions which optimize execution and profits. It is imperative that non-technical decision makers acquire the rigorous skills necessary to perform such analysis and do it thoroughly and correctly. It is insufficient to pass the buck by mandating such processes to middle and lower non-technical management where as a group they revolt and water down what might be a rigorous, mathematical analysis method, further passing the buck to pseudo-techies who are then allocated Martial Arts degrees like "black-belt" or "green-belt" who's sole purpose is to go around presenting slideware with yet more Management-Lingo and acronyms to boot, and acting as meeting facilitators with a stack of coloured sticky-notes. As a group, employees cannot make the decisions. Executives hold those positions, and in order to make sound business decisions, they need to obtain data objectively and analyze it themselves, without the taint of any bias by those that report to them. Otherwise, This Entropy to thine own corporation be true. August 26, 2004 01:56 AM PDT Permalink