Interesting article in the Guardian on crowdsourcing - companies using large numbers of distributed people rather than technology to solve problems.

While not directly related to working from home it struck a chord with me. I commented on Rands's article on "The Pond". One of the things I wrote was:

"One concern whether remote or not is that if my work is so precisely defined then the company may decide to contract the work elsewhere, possibly off-shore. Human nature means that the unquantifiable work that keeps me valued is so much more visible in the pond."

Occasionally I entertain the idea of working remotely so that I can live where I want to live and all the other good stuff around home working. The article was a useful reality check and had me thinking about where I and the people I work with add value.

Another extraordinary TED presentation, this time by Barry Schwartz on The real crisis? We stopped being wise. It echoes a theme I'm seeing in many areas around how an over-attention to goals, metrics, rules, incentives, etc not only demonstrates a lack of trust by those setting them, it actually encourages the very behaviour they are seeking to avoid.

I'm a little leery about SMART goals. It's in all the management books of course and as a manager I'm expected to set them but we tend to over-rely on them. As Barry says in his presentation, we need rules, we need incentives but not more and more of them. They have their place but understand the limitations. I also recommend When Goal Setting Goes Bad which discusses the working paper entitled Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Over-Prescribing Goal Setting.

Barry talks about how any scheme of incentives can be subverted and calls for wisdom and ethics to be nurtured. There's a Wired interview with Barry where he says:

"When you rely on incentives, you undermine virtues. Then when you discover that you actually need people who want to do the right thing, those people don’t exist because you’ve crushed anyone’s desire to do the right thing with all these incentives. And if you bring in a new set of people to replace them — virtuous, moral people who want to do the right thing — and they’re subjected to the same set of incentives, they’re going to become just like the people they replaced.

I’m not talking about getting rid of incentives; people have to make a living. But people need to understand that rules and incentives aren’t enough…. The more rules and incentives you have, the less wisdom you will have. There needs to be room left on the one hand to nurture in people the desire to do the right thing and on the other hand to give them the tools so that they’ll know what the right thing is. This incredible pressure to increase payoffs is an obstacle to doing the right thing. You will never be able to create a system of incentives that rewards people for doing the right thing. The system of incentives may start out that way, but very quickly clever people will find ways to … game it."

Amen to that.

I thoroughly recommend the book "Managing Humans" by Rands, aka Michael Lopp. The pearls of wisdom come thick and fast, it's an easy read and you'll find plenty to laugh and cry about.

I'm a manager in Solaris sustaining - essentially we fix bugs in our released versions of Solaris - rather than product development which is more Rands territory. Having said that, there's lots of commonality between the roles.

It was recommended to me by Dave Walker, a colleague of mine here at Sun UK. It was his tip for the engineer-begat-manager - ie me.

All the chapters are available on-line in Rand's blog, eg Meeting Creatures, but the book neatly groups them and is handy for dipping in and out of when the mood takes you or the panic sets in

On the theme of book reviews - for those with children I also have to recommend the "Mr Gum" books. Full of nonsense words, mad characters and slapstick humour. It certainly amused me and my children (4 and 7) were laughing out loud. Favourite quotes include this description of Padlock the bear:

"He was a proper fat shaggy rumble-me-tumble sort of a roly-poly flip-flap-flopper of a big brown bear"

I had to read that description out loud several nights in a row.

Please read to your children.