Windward Wrocks

A Thousand Shall Fall

When my mom goes to England she will always stop in a used bookstore or two and get a couple of history books for me. Most are good, some poor, and some extraordinary. One trip she sent me one titled A Thousand Shall Fall by Hans Habe. It didn't look like much but it was about a part of WWII I had never read much about so I figured a poor book was better than nothing.

Wow! It was amazing.

It starts off in an international brigade in the French army at the start of WWII. Hans Habe was a Hungarian Jew who joined the brigade to help fight Hitler. I never read much about the German blitz into France – most history sums it up as the Germans came in fast with tanks and the British pulled off an amazing retreat at Dunkirk. But the actual movement and fighting between the Germans & French – not much written about that.

So I'm reading this and it's from the perspective of a smart & worldly soldier in a brigade. So he knows what they are doing, but not any of the larger picture. Ok, that's a good perspective. So you see them prepare to fight the Germans, then are ordered to pull back to a better line. They pull back and prepare, and again are ordered to pull back. Throughout all of this he discusses the esprit-de-core in the brigade which is high. They want to fight the Germans. They want to protect France. They are ready to fight and die to stop or even delay the German army.

As you are reading and the retreat back again and again, never stopping to fight, always on orders from higher up, you get a sinking feeling in your stomach. They never fought. Yes there were some small skirmishes with recon units. But no serious battle. Now this is one person's viewpoint but reading this book you get the impression that while the troops wanted to fight, the French general staff was unwilling to do so.

Now granted WWI had been horrible for France. And the memory of the devastating losses they sustained were still fresh in everyone's mind. But normally in that case the one group you would expect to still be willing to fight is the military leadership as that is what they have trained for their entire life. If anyone will be unwilling to fight, it would be the enlisted men. But here you had the exact opposite where the troops wanted to fight and their leaders had given up. (And as I said above, this is one person's viewpoint.)

Ok, so the brigade was told to surrender. Unfortunately for Hans that would mean death as he was considered a political enemy due to his writing in Austria (before the Anschluss). The next part of the book concerns his running across France trying to escape. It is a story of a French populace that was very scared and the reaction when he asked for help spanned the gamut from hostility to substantial help. In the course of running he was able to take over the identity of a French soldier.

He was captured, but captured as a French soldier and then placed in a prison camp. The book then takes you through the life in the camps including the almost banal everyday corruption of the German guards all the way up to the commanders of the camps. It also includes one moment that could have been the end of everything – when being transported one time one of the German guards kept looking at him quizzically. When it was just the two of them the guard told Hans that he had been a waiter in a Vienna restaurant that Hans frequented. But because Hans had always been a good tipper, he kept his secret.

Hans worked his way into working in the camp administration and from that vantage point he saw that the Germans were trying to find what prisoners were using fake identification and in those cases determining who people really were. This means he did not have much time left before they would uncover his case. At this point he connected up with the French underground and they got him out of France and he made it to the U.S.

Part of what makes this so good is you have a professional newspaperman & writer who is putting those skills to their own story. And it is a compelling story that is too amazing to be true, yet it is. It's a hard book to find but well worth the effort.

The employee who knows everything

About 15 years ago I was talking with the head of game development at one of the major game companies. He commented about how developers will tell you exactly how everything should be done on any subject. Yet even with full knowledge on every subject – they still couldn't deliver software on time. I always found that a very spot-on observation about way too many in the high tech field (including yours truly).

So what do you do with the employee who is happy to tell everyone the best way to do everything, but doesn't listen. Here's the first thing to keep in mind, people with this weakness generally have all the other attributes you want in an employee. They're smart, motivated, intellectual curious, etc. In this case you have someone well worth some extra effort.

Having been on both sides of this (some of my managers from when I was younger must be laughing right now), as a manager I have always tried to get the most out of people in this situation. The thing is, you can do so and you then have someone who is a very valuable employee.

Lets step back for a second. I coached my daughter's soccer team when she was in elementary school. The best advice I got on that was if you tell a team of boys they all played terrible every boy on the team looks at all the others thinking "yeah the rest of you did." Say it to a team of girls and they each take it that you were really talking to just them. How you phrase something depends on your audience – it has to be appropriate.

So what do you do in this case? You hit them over the head with a 2x4 (rhetorically, not literally – although literally is tempting). You have to be direct and blunt. You are trying to break through layers of shields and trying to get them to engage a part of their brain that is by and large turned off. This is why many managers have trouble with this situation, it requires a level of directness far in excess of what is normally used.

First you need to let them know that you are looking to change them. I use the example of how I want to compress 5 years of what I had to learn the hard way into 3 months. And that I know it will be tough for them. This lets someone know why I am going to be in their face and the context for what I bring up. People are smart and if you can get that context through then they will take the rest in that context.

Second, you need to be very direct in terms of how it hurts them. That their value to the company comes from delivering what the company needs, and not slowing any of that down. A great question when something else is proposed rather than what they are working on is to ask which will lead to more sales. It's a very powerful question and if their answer does not address that question just ask it again.

What's interesting about the above is you are not turning this person into an automan or de-motivating them. Instead you are engaging them and forcing them to listen to what they hear, weigh it out in terms of what the company needs from them – and then discuss it. Which is exactly what you want for a smart & motivated employee.

But the key thing is to be direct & blunt about the core issue – that they need to truly listen. And if you aren't sure if you are being blunt enough – you aren't.

If I could do one thing

I wish I could take credit for this idea, but I can't. I first read this in Peopleware by DeMarco & Lister. But before I shoot into the specific point in Peopleware, let's pull back to the big picture.

When things are hectic, there is way too much that must be done, and you are generally drowning – one of the key practices to getting out of that mess is the following. Each morning identify several items you will complete that day. Sometimes the list is long, sometimes it's one thing. Some items are fully completing a task while other items are moving another task forward one step.

Now these items will not fill your day, they may total up to just an hour because of all the other things you have to work on or respond to. But what is critical is that the list you come up with can be completed that day. And you write the list in the calm first moments of the day.

At the end of any given day you won't see much difference due to this practice. Truly all you did was complete some tasks instead of others – no real difference for that day. But after a week you should see a couple of critical issue be completed. After a month you should see that the number of serious issues on your plate has lessened. This focus over time is very powerful.

Ok, so with that side trip lets now talk about getting people at work as productive as possible. Using the above approach, let's say I can do one thing, just one thing, to improve productivity. What would it be?

Eliminate interruptions.

Granted, this helps for some jobs more than others. But for programmers and others that are heads down concentrate on the work jobs, this will boost productivity more than anything else. Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister have spent their professional lives studying programmer productivity and they distill it down to this – eliminating interruptions helps more than everything else put together.

So how do you do this? Well the easy part is individual offices. It's a bit more effort to create a corporate culture where a closed door means do not disturb. Not knock first but DO NOT DISTURB. This takes direct reminders by managers when someone interrupts another to ask – was that worth totally blowing their concentration. I've found this takes about 3 weeks (at one company I had to sit in the main hallway for 2 days to get it started).

The hardest part is getting people to shut down their communication. We now expect everyone to always be immediately available. Getting people to close IM, turn off email (set Outlook to work offline), turn off the cell phone, etc. – that is a lifestyle change. And you can't mandate it and have it work well. What I have found works pretty well on this is to ask people to try it for 2 days. And they will find disconnecting some parts ok, while other connections they find themselves missing.

And so you get part way there. And then after a month or so, when someone is behind on some really hard work, suggest they disconnect again just while getting caught up. They know the drill, they have seen the improvement from the communication they have already shut down while working, and most people will disconnect to get caught up.

Now the bad news. If you manage a group where you are encouraging them to disconnect from the world to get their work done, then you have to be always available. Because the rest of the company is going to insist that they can talk to someone, and talk to them immediately. So you have to be available to run interference. And this also means when someone wants an update on work in process, you will have to tell them that you may not get an answer for 4 hours – which most people consider unacceptably long in today's world. But waiting longer to get a status report equates to having the task completed sooner.

So a question for all of you reading this – if you could do one thing at work, what would it be?

Revision control is much more than version control

Version control is great and with new products like SharePoint hitting widespread use, it is becoming a common part of document management. But version control has some major limitations.

The first is that the comments tied to a new version are tied to the document as a whole when you really want comments spread throughout the document each tied to a point in the document where that comment is discussing that change. Comments are even more powerful when used to comment on suggested changes where the document is not changed, but a suggestion is tied to a specific point.

The second is how changes are displayed. With version control you can get a difference between the old and new document. But that is a cumbersome procedure and it is read only. Much better is a system that shows the changes in the document, identifies who made each change (and has their comments right there), and provides the reviewer the ability to accept or reject each change.

This detailed view of changes to a document is revision control. And when married with version control, provides a superb document management system. This is available today in the case of Word & Excel documents. For both of these you can turn on track changes to get revision control and combined with SharePoint or another version control system, you then have the perfect document management & tracking system. For word processing & spreadsheets – problem solved.

But what about report and docgen templates? The changes made to a template can have serious consequences. Changing the legal wording in generated insurance documents or the calculations in financial reports can lead to significant financial costs. Reviewing exactly what was changed, who changed, their comments about the change, and then approving and rejecting each individual change is critically important for companies.

In the case of report & docgen template design – revision control is essential.

And the good news is that this is available – from Windward Reports. Because Windward uses Word, Excel, & PowerPoint as its report templates, you can use the revision control in Office for your template revision control. You can even feed Windward templates where the tracking is on with some changes approved and some not, comments included, etc, and Windward will ignore the comments and use only the approved changes. This means you can permanently store your templates with all the revision tracking intact.

What's really cool about this is the effort we had to put in at Windward to make use of this functionality in Office. None. That's right, there was absolutely nothing we had to do. This is one of the great advantages of using Office as our report & docgen design tool – for much of the significant functionality our system provides we don't have to do anything.

And when Office adds new features, our customers are able to use those features without our having to add or change anything. So improvements in Office are by definition improvements in Windward Reports. Basically the Microsoft Office team is part of our team (but don't tell them that).