《高效的项目和团队》

Productive Projects and Teams是一本好书。 许多其中许多关于管理和沟通的精辟言论让我大有相见很晚之感。其实不仅是软件的开发项目，任何项目，甚至任何行业的管理，都首先是对人的管理，然后才是对事物的管理，所以设身处地的为别人着想，用鼓励来代替批评，用相互学习来取消互相排挤，在失败中学习，在前进中自醒，则无往而不胜。

鉴于原书是英文的，我打算利用业余时间把它翻译成中文，一来方便后学者，二来以此提高自己的英文水平。我将在这里随时提供翻译的最新动态。

下面是原文文本

PART I
MANAGING THE HUMAN
RESOURCE


Most of us as managers are prone to one particular failing: a 
tendency to manage people as though they were modular components. 
It's obvious enough where this tendency comes from. 
Consider the preparation we had for the task of management: We 
were judged to be good management material because we performed 
well as doers, as technicians and developers. That often involved 
organizing our resources into modular pieces, such as software routines, 
circuits, or other units of work. The modules we constructed 
were made to exhibit a black-box characteristic, so that their internal 
idiosyncrasies could be safely ignored. They were designed to be 
used with a standard interface. 

After years of reliance on these modular methods, small wonder 
that as newly promoted managers, we try to manage our human 
resources the same way. Unfortunately, it doesn't work very well. 

In Part I, we begin to investigate a very different way of 
thinking about and managing people. That way involves specific 
accommodation to the very nonmodular character of the human 
resource. 


Chapter 1 

SOMEWHERE TODAY,
A PROJECT IS FAILING


Since the days when computers first came into common use, 
there must have been tens of thousands of accounts receivable programs 
written. There are probably a dozen or more accounts receivable 
projects underway as you read these words. And somewhere 
today, one of them is failing. 

Imagine that! A project requiring no real technical innovation 
is going down the tubes. Accounts receivable is a wheel that's been 
reinvented so often that many veteran developers could stumble 
through such projects with their eyes closed. Yet these efforts 
sometimes still manage to fail. 

Suppose that at the end of one of these debacles, you were 
called upon to perform an autopsy. (It would never happen, of 
course; there is an inviolable industry standard that prohibits examining 
our failures.) Suppose, before all the participants had scurried 
off for cover, you got a chance to figure out what had gone wrong. 
One thing you would not find is that the technology had sunk the 
project. Safe to say, the state of the art has advanced sufficiently so 
that accounts receivable systems are technically possible. Something 
else must be the explanation. 

Each year since 1977, we have conducted a survey of development 
projects and their results. We've measured project size, 
cost, defects, acceleration factors, and success or failure in meeting 
schedules. We've now accumulated more than five hundred project 
histories, all of them from real-world development efforts. 

We observe that about fifteen percent of all projects studied 
came to naught: They were canceled or aborted or "postponed" or 


4 PEOPLEWARE 

they delivered products that were never used. For bigger projects, 
the odds are even worse. Fully twenty-five percent of projects that 
lasted twenty-five work-years or more failed to complete. In the 
early surveys, we discarded these failed data points and analyzed the 
others. Since 1979, though, we've been contacting whoever is left 
of the project staff to find out what went wrong. For the overwhelming 
majority of the bankrupt projects we studied, there was 
not a single technological issue to explain the failure, 

The Name of the Game 

The cause of failure most frequently cited by our survey participants 
was "politics." But now observe that people tend to use this word 
rather sloppily. Included under "politics" are such unrelated or 
loosely related things as communication problems, staffing problems, 
disenchantment with the boss or with the client, lack of motivation, 
and high turnover. People often use the word politics to 
describe any aspect of the work that is people-related, but the 
English language provides a much more precise term for these 
effects: They constitute the project's sociology. The truly political 
problems are a tiny and pathological subset. 

If you think of a problem as political in nature, you tend to be 
fatalistic about it. You know you can stand up to technical challenges, 
but honestly, who among us can feel confident in the realm 
of politics? By noting the true nature of a problem as sociological 
rather than political, you make it more tractable. Project and team 
sociology may be a bit outside your field of expertise, but not 
beyond your capabilities. 

Whatever you name these people-related problems, they're 
more likely to cause you trouble on your next assignment than all the 
design, implementation, and methodology issues you'll have to deal 
with. In fact, that idea is the underlying thesis of this whole book: 

The major problems of our work are not so much 

technological as sociological in nature. 

Most managers are willing to concede the idea that they've got 
more people worries than technical worries. But they seldom manage 
that way. They manage as though technology were their principal 
concern. They spend their time puzzling over the most convoluted 
and most interesting puzzles that their people will have to 


SOMEWHERE TODAY, A PROJECT IS FAILING 5 

solve, almost as though they themselves were going to do the work 
rather than manage it. They are forever on the lookout for a technical 
whiz-bang that promises to automate away part of the work (see 
Chapter 6, "Laetrile," for more on this effect). The most strongly 
people-oriented aspects of their responsibility are often given the 
lowest priority. 

Part of this phenomenon is due to the upbringing of the average 
manager. He or she was schooled in how the job is done, not 
how the job is managed. It's a rare firm in which new managers 
have done anything that specifically indicates an ability or an aptitude 
for management. They've got little management experience and 
no meaningful practice. So how do new managers succeed in convincing 
themselves that they can safely spend most of their time 
thinking technology and little or no time thinking about the people 
side of the problem? 

The High-Tech Illusion 

Perhaps the answer is what we've come to think of as the High-
Tech Illusion: the widely held conviction among people who deal 
with any aspect of new technology (as who of us does not?) that 
they are in an intrinsically high-tech business. They are indulging in 
the illusion whenever they find themselves explaining at a cocktail 
party, say, that they are "in computers," or "in telecommunications," 
or "in electronic funds transfer." The implication is that they are part 
of the high-tech world. Just between us, they usually aren't. The 
researchers who made fundamental breakthroughs in those areas are 
in a high-tech business. The rest of us are appliers of their work. 
We use computers and other new technology components to develop 
our products or to organize our affairs. Because we go about this 
work in teams and projects and other tightly knit working groups, 
we are mostly in the human communication business. Our successes 
stem from good human interactions by all participants in the 
effort, and our failures stem from poor human interactions. 

The main reason we tend to focus on the technical rather than 
the human side of the work is not because it's more crucial, but 
because it's easier to do. Getting the new disk drive installed is positively 
trivial compared to figuring out why Horace is in a blue funk 
or why Susan is dissatisfied with the company after only a few 
months. Human interactions are complicated and never very crisp 
and clean in their effects, but they matter more than any other aspect 
of the work. 


6 PEQPLEWARE 

If you find yourself concentrating on the technology rather 
than the sociology, you're like the vaudeville character who loses 
his keys on a dark street and looks for them on the adjacent street 
because, as he explains, "The light is better there." 


Chapter 2


MAKE A CHEESEBURGER,
SELL A CHEESEBURGER


Development is inherently different from production. But 
managers of development and allied efforts often allow their thinking 
to be shaped by a management philosophy derived entirely from 
a production environment. 

Imagine for the moment that you're the manager of the local 
fast food franchise. It makes perfect sense for you to take any or all 
of the following efficient production measures: 

. Squeeze out error. Make the machine (the human machine) 
run as smoothly as possible. 
Take a hard line about people goofing off on the job. 
. Treat workers as interchangeable pieces of the machine. 
. Optimize the steady state. (Don't even think about how the 
operation got up to speed, or what it would take to close it 
down.) 
. Standardize procedure. Do everything by the book. 
. Eliminate experimentation—that's what the folks at headquarters 
are paid for. 
These would be reasonable approaches if you were in the fast food 
business (or any production environment), but you're not. The 
"make a cheeseburger, sell a cheeseburger" mentality can be fatal in 
your development area. It can only serve to damp your people's 
spirits and focus their attention away from the real problems at hand. 
This style ofmanagementwill be directly atodds with the work. 


8 PEOPLEWARE 

To manage thinking workers effectively, you need to take 
measures nearly opposite those listed above. Our proposed opposite 
approaches are described in the following sections. 

A Quota for Errors 

For most thinking workers, making an occasional mistake is a natural 
and healthy part of their work. But there can be an almost Biblical 
association between error on the job and sin. This is an attitude 
we need to take specific pains to change. 

Speaking to a group of software managers, we introduced a 
strategy for what we think of as iterative design. The idea is that 
some designs are intrinsically defect-prone; they ought to be rejected, 
not repaired. Such dead ends should be expected in the design 
activity. The lost effort of the dead end is a small price to pay for a 
clean, fresh start. To our surprise, many managers felt this would 
pose an impossible political problem for their own bosses: "How 
can we throw away a product that our company has paid to produce?" 
They seemed to believe that they'd be better off salvaging 
the defective version even though it might cost more in the long run. 

Fostering an atmosphere that doesn't allow for error simply 
makes people defensive. They don't try things that may turn out 
badly. You encourage this defensiveness when you try to systematize 
the process, when you impose rigid methodologies so that staff 
members are not allowed to make any of the key strategic decisions 
lest they make them incorrectly. The average level of technology 
may be modestly improved by any steps you take to inhibit error. 
The team sociology, however, can suffer grievously. 

The opposite approach would be to encourage people to make 
some errors. You do this by asking your folks on occasion what 
dead-end roads they've been down, and by making sure they 
understand that "none" is not the best answer. When people blow 
it, they should be congratulated—that's part of what they're being 
paid for. 

Management: The Bozo Definition 

Management is a complex enough thing to defy simple definition, 
but that nuance was lost on one senior manager we encountered at a 
professional society meeting in London. He summed up his entire 


MAKE A CHEESEBURGER,SELL ACHEESEBURGER 9 

view of the subject with this statement: "Management is kicking 
ass." This equates to the view that managers provide all the thinking 
and the people underneath them just carry out their bidding. Again, 
that might be workable for cheeseburger production, but not for any 
effort for which people do the work with their heads rather than their 
hands. Everyone in such an environment has got to have the brain 
in gear. You may be able to kick people to make them active, but 
not to make them creative, inventive, and thoughtful. 

Even if kicking people in the backside did boost their short-
term productivity, it might not be useful in the long run: There is 
nothing more discouraging to any worker than the sense that his 
own motivation is inadequate and has to be "supplemented" by that 
of the boss. 

The saddest thing about this management approach is that it's 
almost always superfluous. You seldom need to take Draconian 
measures to keep your people working; most of them love their 
work. You may even have to take steps sometimes to make them 
work less, and thus get more meaningful work done (more about 
this idea in Chapter 3). 

The People Store 

In a production environment, it's convenient to think of people as 
parts of the machine. When a part wears out, you get another. The 
replacement part is interchangeable with the original. You order a 
new one, more or less, by number. 

Many development managers adopt the same* attitude. They go 
to great lengths to convince themselves that no one is irreplaceable. 
Because they fear that a key person will leave, they force themselves 
to believe that there is no such thing as a key person. Isn't that the 
essence of management, after all, to make sure that the work goes 
on whether the individuals stay or not? They act as though there 
were a magical People Store they could call up and say, "Send me a 
new George Gardenhyer, but make him a little less uppity." 

One of my clients brought a splendid employee into a 
salary review and was just amazed that the fellow 
wanted something other than money. He said that he 
often had good ideas at home but that his slow dial-up 
terminal was a real bother to use. Couldn't the company 
install a new line into his house and buy him a 


10 PEOPLEWARE 

high-performance terminal? The company could. In 
subsequent years, it even built and furnished a small 
home office for the fellow. But my client is an unusual 
case. I wonder what a less perceptive manager would 
have done. Too many managers are threatened by anything 
their workers do to assert their individuality. 

—TRL 

One example ofjust such a less perceptive manager was a boss 
who showed extreme signs of being threatened by his people's 
individuality: He had one very talented worker on the road for much 
of the year visiting client sites and as a result living on expense 
account. An analysis of the man's expense reports showed that his 
expenditures on food were way out of line with those of other travelers. 
He spent fifty percent more on food than the others did. In 
an indignant public memo, the boss branded the worker a "food 
criminal." Now, the worker's total expenditures weren't out of line; 
whatever extra he spent on food, he saved on something else. The 
man was not more expensive, he was just different. 

The uniqueness of every worker is a continued annoyance to 
the manager who has blindly adopted a management style from the 
production world. The natural people manager, on the other hand, 
realizes that uniqueness is what makes project chemistry vital and 
effective. It's something to be cultivated. 

A Project in Steady State Is Dead 

Steady-state production thinking is particularly ill-suited to project 
work. We tend to forget that a project's entire purpose in life is to 
put itself out of business. The only steady state in the life of a project 
is rigor mortis. Unless you're riding herd on a canceled or 
about-to-be-canceled project, the entire focus of project management 
ought to be the dynamics of the development effort. Yet the way we 
assess people's value to a new project is often based on their steady-
state characteristics: how much code they can write or how much 
documentation they can produce. We pay far too little attention to 
how well each of them/ite into the effort as a whole. 

/ was teaching an in-house design course some years 
ago, when one of the upper managers buttonholed me to 
request that I assess some of the people in the course 


MAKE A CHEESEBURGER, SELL A CHEESEBURGER 11 

(his project staff). He was particularly curious about 
one woman. It was obvious he had his doubts about her: 
"I don't quite see what she adds to a project^she's not a 
great developer or tester or much of anything." With a 
little investigation, I turned up this intriguing fact: 
During her twelve years at the company, the woman in 
question had never worked on a project that had been 
anything other than a huge success. It wasn't obvious 
what she was adding, but projects always succeeded 
when she was around. After watching her in class for a 
week and talking to some of her co-workers, I came to 
the conclusion that she was a superb catalyst. Teams 
naturally jelled better when she was there. She helped 
people communicate with each other and get along. 
Projects were more fun when she was part of them. 
When I tried to explain this idea to the manager, I 
struck out. He just didn't recognize the role of catalyst 
as essential to a project. 

-TDM 

The catalyst is important because the project is always in a 
state of flux. Someone who can help a project to jell is worth two 
people who just do work. 

We Haven't Got Time to Think About This Job, 
Only to Do It 

If you are charged with getting a task done, what proportion of your 
time ought to be dedicated to actually doing the task? Not one hundred 
percent. There ought to be some provision for brainstorming, 
investigating new methods, figuring out how to avoid doing some 
of the subtasks, reading, training, and just goofing off. 

Looking back over our own years as managers, we've both 
concluded that we were off-track on this subject. We spent far too 
much of our time trying to get things done and not nearly enough 
time asking the key question, "Ought this thing to be done at all?" 
The steady-state cheeseburger mentality barely even pays lip service 
to the idea of thinking on the job. Its every inclination is to push the 
effort into one hundred percent do-mode. If an excuse is needed for 
the lack of think-time, the excuse is always time pressure—as 
though there were ever work to be done without time pressure. 




The importance of a more considered approach goes up 
sharply as the stakes increase. It's when the truly Herculean effort 
is called for that we have to learn to do work less of the time and 
think about the work more. The more heroic the effort required, the 
more important it is that the team members learn to interact well and 
enjoy it The project that has to be done by an impossible fixed date 
is the very one that can't afford not to have frequent brainstorms and 
even a project dinner or some such affair to help the individual participants 
knitinto aneffective whole. 

But all that is motherhood. Everybody knows that and acts 
accordingly, right? Wrong. We are so single-mindedly oriented 
toward Doing Something, Anything that we spend a scant five percent 
ofour time on the combined activities ofplanning, investigating 
new methods, training, reading books, estimating, budgeting, 
scheduling, and allocating personnel. (The five percent figure comes 
from an analysis of system development projects, but it seems to 
apply more broadly than that, perhaps to the entire category of 
salaried workers.) 

The statistics about reading are particularly discouraging: The 
average software developer, for example, doesn't own a single book 
on the subject of his or her work, and hasn't ever read one. That 
fact is horrifying for anyone concerned about the quality of work in 
the field; for folks like us who write books, it is positively tragic. 


Chapter 3


VIENNA WAITSFOR YOU


Some years ago I was swapping war stories with the 
manager of a large project in southern California. He 
began to refate the effect that his project and its crazy 
hours had had on his staff. There were two divorces 
that he could trace directly to the overtime his people 
were putting in, and one of his worker's kids had gotten 
into some kind of trouble with drugs, probably because 
his father had been too busy for parenting during the 
past year. Finally there had been the nervous breakdown 
of the test team leader. 

As he continued through these horrors, I began to 
realize that in his own strange way, the man was bragging. 
You might suspect that with another divorce or 
two and a suicide, the project would have been a complete 
success, at least in his eyes. 

—TDM 

For all the talk about "working smarter," there is a widespread 
sense that what real-world management is all about is getting people 
to work harder and longer, largely at the expense of their personal 
lives. Managers are forever tooting their horns about the quantity of 
overtime their people put in, and the tricks one can use to get even 
more out of them. 


14 PEOPCEWARE 

Spanish Theory Management 

Historians long ago formed an abstraction about different theories of 
value: The Spanish Theory, for one, held that only a fixed amount 
of value existed on earth, and therefore the path to the accumulation 
of wealth was to learn to extract it more efficiently from the soil or 
from people's backs. Then there was the English Theory that held 
that value could be created through ingenuity and technology. So 
the English had an Industrial Revolution, while the Spanish spun 
their wheels trying to exploit the land and the Indians in the New 
World. They moved huge quantities of gold across the ocean, and 
all they got for their effort was enormous inflation (too much gold 
money chasing too few usable goods). 

The Spanish Theory of Value is alive and well among managers 
everywhere. You see that whenever they talk about productivity. 
Productivity ought to mean achieving more in an hour of 
work, but all too often it has come to mean extracting more for an 
hour of pay. There is a large difference. The Spanish Theory managers 
dream of attaining new productivity levels through the simple 
mechanism of unpaid overtime. They divide whatever work is done 
in a week by forty hours, not by the eighty or ninety hours that the 
worker actually put in. 

That's not exactly productivity—it?s more like fraud—but 
it's the state of the art for many American managers. They bully and 
cajole their people into long hours. They impress upon them how 
important the delivery date is (even though it may be totally arbitrary; 
the world isn't going to stop just because a project completes a 
month late). They trick them into accepting hopelessly tight schedules, 
shame them into sacrificing any and all to meet the deadline, 
and do anything to get them to work longer and harder. 

And Now a Word from the Home Front 

Although your staff may be exposed to the message "Work longer 
and harder" while they're at the office, they're getting a very different 
message at home. The message at home is, "Life is passing you 
by. Your laundry is piling up in the closet, your babies are uncuddled, 
your spouse is starting to look elsewhere. There is only one 


VIENNA WAITS FOR YOU 15 

time around on this merry-go-round called life, only one shot at the 
brass ring. And if you use your life up on COBOL.,." 

But you know when the truth is told,
That you can get what you want or you can just get old.
You're going to kick off before you even get halfway through.
When will you realize . . . Vienna waits for you?


—"The Stranger," Billy Joel 

The Vienna that waits for you, in Billy Joel's phrase, is the 
last stop on your personal itinerary. When you get there, it's all 
over. If you think your project members never worry about such 
weighty matters, think again. Your people are very aware of the one 
short life that each person is allotted. And they know too well that 
there has got to be something more important than the silly job 
they're working on. 

There AIn?i No .Such Thing as Overtime 

Overtime for salaried workers is a figment of the naive manager's 
imagination. Oh, there might be some benefit in a few extra hours 
worked on Saturday to meet a Monday deadline, but that's almost 
always followed by an equal period of compensatory "undertime" 
while the workers catch up with their lives. Throughout the effort 
there will be more or less an hour of undertime for every hour of 
overtime. The trade-off might work to your advantage for the short 
term, but for the long term it will cancel out 

Slow down you crazy child, 

And take the phone off the hook and disappear for a while. 

It's all right. You can afford to lose a day or two. 

When will you realize . . . Vienna waits for you? 

Just as the unpaid overtime was largely invisible to the Spanish 
Theory manager (who always counts the week as forty hours 
regardless of how much time the people put in), so too is the undertime 
invisible. You never see it on anybody's time sheet. It's time 
spent on the phone or in bull sessions or just resting. Nobody can 


16 PEOPLEWARE 

really work much more than forty hours, at least not continually and 
with the level of intensity required for creative work. 

Overtime is like sprinting: It makes some sense for the last 
hundred yards of the marathon for those with any energy left, but if 
you start sprinting in the first mile, you're just wasting time. Trying 
to get people to sprint too much can only result in loss of respect for 
the manager. The best workers have been through it all before; they 
know enough to keep silent and roll their eyes while the manager 
raves on that the job has got to get done by April. Then they take 
their compensatory undertime when they can, and end up putting in 
forty hours of real work each week. The best workers react that 
way; the others are workaholics. 

Workaholics 

Workaholics will put in uncompensated overtime. They'll work 
extravagant hours, though perhaps with declining effectiveness. Put 
them under enough pressure and they will go a long way toward 
spoiling their personal lives. But only for a while. Sooner or later 
the message comes through to even the most dedicated workaholic: 

Slow down, you're doing fine,
You can't be everything you want to be before your time.
Although it's so romantic on the borderline tonight.
But when will you realize . . . Vienna waits for you?


Once that idea is digested, the worker is lost forever after to 
the project. The realization that one has sacrificed a more important 
value (family, love, home, youth) for a less important value (work) 
is devastating. It makes the person who has unwittingly sacrificed 
seek revenge. He doesn't go to the boss and explain calmly and 
thoughtfully that things have to change in the future—he just quits, 
another case of burnout. One way or the other, he's gone. 

Workaholism is an illness, but not an illness like alcoholism 
that affects only the unlucky few. Workaholism is more like the 
common cold: Everyone has a bout of it now and then. Our purpose 
in writing about it here is not so much to discuss its causes and 
cures, but to address the simpler problem of how you, the manager, 
ought to deal with your workaholics. If you exploit them to the hilt 
in typical Spanish Theory fashion, you'll eventually lose them. No 
matter how desperately you need them to put in all those hours, you 


VIENNA WAITS FOR YOU 17 

can't let them do so at the expense of their personal lives. The loss 
of a good person isn't worth it. This point goes beyond the narrow 
area of workaholism, into the much more complex subject of meaningful 
productivity. 

Productivity: Winning Battles and Losing Wars 

Next time you hear someone talking about productivity, listen carefully 
to hear if the speaker ever uses the word turnover. Chances 
are that he or she will not. In years of hearing productivity discussed 
and in hundreds of articles about it, we have never encountered 
a single expert that had anything to say about the related subject 
of turnover. But what sense can it possibly make to discuss one 
without the other? Consider some of the things that organizations 
typically do to improve productivity: 

. pressure, people to put in more hours 
. mechanize the process of product development 
. compromise the quality of the product (more about this in 
the next chapter) 
. standardize procedures 
Any of these measures can potentially make the work less enjoyable 
and less satisfying. Hence, the process of improving productivity 
risks worsening turnover. That doesn't say you can't improve productivity 
without paying a turnover price. It only says you need to 
take turnover into account whenever you set out to attain higher 
productivity. Otherwise, you may achieve an "improvement" that is 
more than offset by the loss of your key people. 

Most organizations don't even keep statistics on turnover. 
Virtually none can tell you what replacement of an experienced 
worker costs. And whenever productivity is considered, it is done 
as though turnover were nonexistent or cost-free. The Eagle project 
at Data General is a case in point The project was a Spanish Theory 
triumph: Workaholic project members put in endless unpaid overtime 
hours to push productivity to unheard of levels. At the end of 
the project, virtually the entire development staff quit What was the 
cost of that? No one even figured it into the equation. 

Productivity has to be defined as benefit divided by cost. The 
benefit is observed dollar savings and revenue from the work per



18 PEOPLEWARE 

formed, and cost is the total cost, including replacement of any 
workers used up by the effort. 

Reprise 

During the past year, I did some consulting for a project 
that was proceeding so smoothly that the project 
manager knew she would deliver the product on schedule. 
She was summoned in front of the management 
committee and asked for a progress report. She said 
she could guarantee that her product would be ready by 
the deadline of March 1, exactly on time according to 
the original estimate. The upper managers chewed over 
that piece of unexpected good news and then called her 
in again the next day. Since she was on time for March 
1, they explained, the deadline had been moved up to 
January 15. 

—TRL 

A schedule that the project could actually meet was of no value 
to those Spanish Theory managers, because it didn't put the people 
under pressure. Better to have a hopelessly impossible schedule to 
extract more labor from the workers. 

Chances are, you've known one or more Spanish Theory 
managers during your career. It's all very well to smile at their 
short-sightedness, but don't let yourself off the hook too easily. 
Each of us has succumbed at one time or another to the short-term 
tactic of putting people under pressure to get them to work harder. 
In order to do mis, we have to ignore their decreased effectiveness 
and the resultant turnover, but ignoring bad side effects is easy. 
What's not so easy is keeping in mind an inconvenient truth like this 
one: 

People under time pressure don't work better; 
they Just work faster. 

In order to work faster, they may have to sacrifice the quality 
of the product and their own job satisfaction. 


Chapter 4


QUALITY—IF TIME PERMITS


Twentieth centurypsychological theory holds that man's character 
is dominated by a small number of basic instincts: survival, 
self-esteem, reproduction, territory, and so forth. These are built 
directly into the brain's firmware. You can consider these instincts 
intellectually without great passion (that's what you're doing now), 
but when you feel them, there is always passion involved Even the 
slightest challenge to one of these built-in values can be upsetting. 

Whenever strong emotions are aroused, it's an indication that 
one of the brain's instinctive values has been threatened. A novice 
manager may believe that work can be completed without people's 
emotions ever getting involved but if you have any experience at all 
as a manager, you have learned the opposite. Our work gives us 
plenty of opportunity to exercise the emotions. 

Chances are, you can think of at least one incident when a 
person's emotions did flare up as a direct result of something purely 
work-related Consider that incident now and ask yourself (probably 
for the nth time), Where did all the emotion come from? Without 
knowing anything about your specific incident, we're willing to bet 
that threatened self-esteem was a factor. There may be many and 
varied causes of emotional reaction in one's personal life, but in the 
workplace, the major arouser of emotions is threatened self-esteem. 

We all tend to tie our self-esteem strongly to the quality of the 
product we produce—not the quantity of product, but the quality, 
(For some reason, there is little satisfaction in turning out huge 
amounts of mediocre stuff, although that may be just what's 
required for a given situation.) Any step you take that may jeopar



20 PEOPLEWARE 

dize the quality of the product is likely to set the emotions of your 
staff directly against you. 

The Flight from Excellence 

Managers jeopardize product quality by setting unreachable deadlines. 
They don't think about their action in such terms; they think 
rather that what they're doing is throwing down an interesting challenge 
to their workers, something to help them strive for excellence. 

Experienced (jaded) workers know otherwise. They know 
that under the gun, their efforts will be overconstrained. There will 
be no freedom to trade off resources to make on-time delivery possible. 
They won't have the option of more people or reduced function. 
The only thing to give on will be quality. Workers kept under 
extreme time pressure will begin to sacrifice quality. They will push 
problems under the rug to be dealt with later or foisted off onto the 
product's end user. They will deliver products that are unstable and 
not really complete. They will hate what they're doing, but what 
other choice do they have? 

The hard-nosed, real-world manager part of you has an 
answer to all this: "Some of my folks would tinker forever with a 
task, all in the name of 'Quality.' But the market doesn't give a 
damn about that much quality—it's screaming for the product to be 
delivered yesterday and will accept it even in a quick-and-dirty 
state." In many cases, you may be right about the market, but the 
decision to pressure people into delivering a product that doesn't 
measure up to their own quality standards is almost always a mistake. 


We managers tend to think of quality as just another attribute 
of the product, something that may be supplied in varying degrees 
according to the needs of the marketplace. It's like the chocolate 
sauce you pour onto a homemade sundae: more for people who 
want more, and less for people who want less. 

The builders' view of quality, on the other hand, is very different. 
Since their self-esteem is strongly tied to the quality of the 
product, they tend to impose quality standards of their own. The 
minimum that will satisfy them is more or less the best quality they 
have achieved in the past. This is invariably a higher standard than 
what the market requires and is willing to pay for. 


QUALITY—IF TIME PERMITS 21 

"The market doesn't give a damn about that much quality." 
Read those words and weep, because they are almost always true. 
People may talk in glowing terms about quality or complain bitterly 
about its absence, but when it comes time to pay the price for quality, 
their true values become apparent. On a software project, for 
instance, you might be able to make the following kind of presentation 
to your users: "We can extrapolate from empirical evidence that 
the Mean Time Between Failures for this product is now approximately 
1.2 hours. So if we deliver it to you today, on time, it will 
have very poor stability. If we put in another three weeks, we can 
forecast MTBF of approximately 2,000 hours, a rather respectable 
result." Expect to see some Olympic-class hemming and hawing. 
The users will explain that they are as quality-conscious as the next 
fellow, but three weeks is real money. 

Speaking of software, that industry has accustomed its clients 
to accept in-house developed application programs with an average 
defect density of one to three defects per hundred lines of code! 
With sublime irony, this disastrous record is often blamed on poor 
quality consciousness of the builders. That is, those same folks 
who are chided for being inclined to "tinker forever with a program, 
all in the name of 'Quality'" are also getting blamed for poor 
Let's put the blame where it belongs. He who pays the piper is 
calling for a low-quality tune. By regularly putting the development 
process under extreme time pressure and then accepting poor-quality 
products, the software user community has shown its true quality 
standard. 


All of this may sound like a diatribe against software users and 
against the standards of the marketplace in general, but it needn't be 
taken that way. We have to assume that the people who pay for our 
work are of sound enough mind to make a sensible trade-off between 
quality and cost. The point here is that the client's perceived 
needs for quality in the product are often not as great as those of the 
builder. There is a natural conflict. Reducing the quality of a product 
is likely to cause some people not to buy, but the reduced market 
penetration that results from virtually any such quality reduction will 
often be more than offset by increased profit on each item sold. 

Allowing the standard of quality to be set by the buyer, rather 
than the builder, is what we call the flight from excellence. A market-
derived quality standard seems to make good sense only as long 
as you ignore the effect on the builder's attitude and effectiveness. 


22 PEOPLEWARE 

In the long run, market-based quality costs more. The lesson 
here is, 

Quality, far beyond that required by the end user, 
is a means to higher productivity. 

If you doubt that notion, imagine the following gedanken 
experiment: Ask one hundred people on the street what organization 
or culture or nation is famous for high quality. We predict that more 
than half the people today would answer, "Japan." Now ask a different 
hundred people what organization or culture or nation is 
famous for high productivity. Again, the majority can be expected 
to mention, "Japan." The nation that is an acknowledged quality 
leader is also known for its high productivity. 

Wait a minute. How is it possible that higher quality coexists 
with higher productivity? That flies in the face of the common wisdom 
that adding quality to a product means you pay more to build it. 
For a clue, read the words of Tajima and Matsubara, two of the 
most respected commentators on the Japanese phenomenon: 

The trade-off between price and quality does not exist 
in Japan. Rather, the idea that high quality brings on 
cost reduction is widely accepted. 

Quality Is Free, But . . . 

Philip Crosby presented this same concept in his book, Quality Is 
Free, published in 1979. In this work, Crosby gave numerous 
examples and a sound rationale for the idea that letting the builder set 
a satisfying quality standard of his own will result in a productivity 
gain sufficient to offset the cost of improved quality. 

We have an awful inkling that Crosby's book has done more 
harm than good in industry. The problem is that the great majority 
of managers haven't read it, but everybody has heard the title. The 
title has become the whole message. Managers everywhere are 
enthusing over quality: "The sky's the limit for quality, we'll have 
as much free quality as we can get!" This hardly boils down to a 
positive quality consciousness. The attitude is just the opposite of 
what Crosby advocates. 


QUALITY—IF TIME PERMITS 23 

The real message of the linked quality and productivity effects 
needs to be presented in slightly different terms: 

Quality Is free, but only to those who are willing 
to pay heavily for it. 

The organization that is willing to budget only zero dollars and 
zero cents for quality will always get its money's worth, A policy 
of "Quality—If Time Permits" will assure that no quality at all 
sneaks into the product. 

Hewlett-Packard is an example of an organization that reaps 
the benefits from increased productivity due to high, builder-set 
quality standards. The company makes a cult of quality. In such an 
environment, the argument that more time or money is needed to 
produce a high-quality product is generally not heard. The result is 
that developers know they are part of a culture that delivers quality 
beyond what the marketplace requires. Their sense of quality 
identification works for increased job satisfaction and some of the 
lowest turnover figures seen anywhere in the industry. 

Power of Veto 

In some Japanese companies, notably Hitachi Software and parts of 
Fujitsu, the project team has an effective power of veto over delivery 
of what they believe to be a not-yet-ready product. No matter that 
the client would be willing to accept even a substandard product, the 
team can insist that delivery wait until its own standards are 
achieved. Of course, project managers are under the same pressure 
there that they are here: They're being pressed to deliver something, 
anything, right away. But enough of a quality culture has been built 
up so that these Japanese managers know better than to bully their 
workers into settling for lower quality. 

Could you give your people power of veto over delivery? Of 
course it would take nerves of steel, at least the first time. Your 
principal concern would be that Parkinson's Law would be working 
against you. That's an important enough subject to warrant a chapter 
of its own. 


Chapter 5


PARKINSON'S LAW REVISITED


Writing in 1954, the British author C. Northcote Parkinson 
introduced the notion that work expands to fill the time allocated for 
it, now known as Parkinson's Law. 

If you didn't know that few managers receive any management 
training at all, you might think there was a school they all went to 
for an intensive course on Parkinson's Law and its ramifications. 
Even managers that know they know nothing about management 
nonetheless cling to that one axiomatic truth governing people and 
their attitude toward work: Parkinson's Law. It gives them the 
strongest possible conviction that-the only way to get work done at 
all is to set an impossibly optimistic delivery date. 

Parkinson's Law and Newton's Law 

Parkinson's Law is a long way from being axiomatic. It's not a law 
in the same sense that Newton's law is a law. Newton was a scientist. 
He investigated the gravitational effect according to the strictest 
scientific method. His law was only propounded after rigorous 
verification and testing. It has stood the test of some two hundred 
years of subsequent study. 

Parkinson was not a scientist. He collected no data, he probably 
didn't even understand the rules of statistical inference. Parkinson 
was a humorist. His "law" didn't catch on because it was so 
true. It caught on because it was funny. 

O/l 


PARKINSON'S LAW REVISITED 25 

Of course, Parkinson's Law wouldn't be funny if there 
weren't a germ of truth in it. Parkinson cites examples of his law as 
observed in a fictitious government bureaucracy, some believe patterned 
on the British Post Office. Bureaucracies are prone to such 
problems, because they give little job-derived satisfaction to their 
workers. But you probably don't work in a bureaucracy. Even if 
you do, you go to great lengths to make sure that your people are 
spared its effects, otherwise they'd never get anything done. The 
result is that your people have the possibility of lots ofjob-derived 
satisfaction. That leads to a simple truth worth stating: 

Parkinson's Law almost certainly doesn't apply to 
your people. 

Their lives are just too short for any loafing on the job. Since 
they enjoy their work, they are disinclined to let it drag on forever—
that would just delay the satisfaction they all hanker for. They 
are as eager as you are to get the job done, provided only that they 
don't have to compromise their standard of quality. 

You Wouldn't Be Saying This If You'd Ever Met 
Our Herb 

Every manager, at least some time in his or her life, has to deal with 
a worker who does seem to be avoiding work, or who seems to 
have no standard of quality, or who just can't get the job done. 
Doesn't that confirm Parkinson's Law? 

In a healthy work environment, the reasons that some people 
don't perform are lack of competence, lack of confidence, and lack 
of affiliation with others on the project and the project goals. In 
none of these cases is schedule pressure liable to help very much. 
When a worker seems unable to perform and seems not tacare at all 
about the quality of his work, for example, it is a sure sign that the 
poor fellow is overwhelmed by the difficulty of the work. He 
doesn't need more pressure. What he needs is reassignment, possibly 
to another company. 




Even on the rare occasion when leaning on someone is the 
only option, the manager is the last person to do the leaning. It 
works far better when the message comes from the team. We've 
seen cases of well-knit teams in which the manager would have had 
to get in line to yell at the one person who wasn't pulling along with 
everyone else. 

We'll have more to say in later chapters about teams and 
building a sensible chemistry for team formation. The point here is 
not what does work, but what doesn't: Treating your people as 
Parkinsonian workers doesn't work. It can only demean and demotivate 
them. 

Some Data from the University of New South Wales 

Of course, the Parkinson's Law mentality is not going to go away 
just because we say it ought to. What would help to convert managers 
would be some carefully collected data proving that Parkinson's 
Law doesn't apply to most workers. (Forget for a moment 
that Parkinson supplied no data at all to prove that the law did apply, 
he just reiterated it for a few hundred pages.) 

Two respected researchers at the University of New South 
Wales, Michael Lawrence and Ross Jeffery, run a project survey 
every year. They measure live projects in industry according to a 
common data collection standard. Each year they focus on a different 
aspect of project work. The 1985 survey provided some data 
that reflects on the inapplicability of Parkinson's Law. It isn't 
exactly the "smoking gun" that completely invalidates the law, but it 
ought to be sufficient to raise some doubts. 

Lawrence and Jeffery set out to determine the productivity 
effect of various estimating methods. They had in mind to prove (or 
disprove) the folkloric belief that developers (programmers, in this 
case) work harder if they're trying to meet their own estimates. For 
each of 103 projects studied, Lawrence and Jeffery formed a 
weighted metric of productivity, similar tothe CoCoMoproductivity 
metrics advocated by Barry Boehm. They then grouped the sample 
into subgroups, depending on how the original estimates we're 
made. A partial result is presented in Table 5.1: 


PARKINSON'S LAW REVISITED 27


Table 5.1
Productivity by Estimation Approach
(Partial Result)


EFFORT ESTIMATE AVERAGE NUMBER OF
PREPARED BY PRODUCTIVITY PROJECTS



Programmer alone 8.0 19
Supervisor alone 6.6 23
Programmer & supervisor 7.8 16


So far, the results confirm the folklore: Programmers seem to 
be a bit more productive when they can do the estimate themselves, 
compared to cases in which the manager does it without even consulting 
them. When the two do the estimating together, the results 
tend to fall in between. 

In 21 projects studied that same year, estimates were prepared 
by a third party, typically a systems analyst. These cases substantially 
outperformed the projects in which estimating was done by a 
programmer and/or a supervisor: 

Table 5.2
Productivity by Estimation Approach
(Partial Result)


EFFORT ESTIMATE AVERAGE NUIVBEROF 
PREPARED BY PRODUCTIVITY PROJECTS 


Programmer alone 8.0 19 
Supervisor alone 6.6 23 
Programmer & supervisor 7.8 16 
Systems analyst 9.5 21 




These last data points do not confirm the folkloric view at all. 
Why should the programmer work harder to meet the analyst's estimate 
than he would for even his own? It may be tempting to explain 
this away as a simple anomaly in the data. But if you believe as we 
do that bad estimates are always a demotivating factor, then this data 
doesn't need explaining away at all. The systems analyst tends to be 
a better estimator than either the programmer or the supervisor. He 
or she typically knows the work in as much detail, but is not hampered 
by the natural optimism of the person who's actually going to 
do the job or the political and budgetary biases of the boss. Moreover, 
systems analysts typically have more estimating experience; 
they are able to project the effort more accurately because they've 
done more of it in the past and have thus learned their lessons. 

Bad estimates, hopelessly tight estimates, sap the builders' 
energy. Capers Jones, known for his metric studies of development 
projects, puts it this way: "When the schedule for a project is totally 
unreasonable and unrealistic, and no amount of overtime can allow it 
to be made, the project team becomes angry and frustrated ... and 
morale drops to the bottom." It doesn't matter too terribly much 
whether the "totally unreasonable and unrealistic" schedule comes 
from the boss or from the builders themselves. People just don't 
work very effectively when they're locked into a no-win situation. 

The most surprising part of the 1985 Jeffery-Lawrence study 
appeared at the very end, when they investigated the productivity of 
24 projects for which no estimates were prepared at all. These projects 
far outperformed all the others: 

Table 5.3 

Productivity by Estimation Approach 
(Full Result) 

EFFORT ESTIMATE AVERAGE NUMBER OF 
PREPARED BY PRODUCTIVITY PROJECTS 

Programmer alone 8.0 19 
Supervisor alone 6.6 23 
Programmer & supervisor 7.8 16 
Systems analyst 9.5 21 
(No estimate) 12.0 24 


PARKINSON'S LAW REVISITED 29 

Projects on which the boss applied no schedule pressure 
whatsoever ("Just wake me up when you're done.") had the highest 
productivity of all. Of course, none of this proves that Parkinson *s 
Law doesn't apply to development workers. But doesn't it make 
you wonder? 

The decision to apply schedule pressure to a project needs to 
be made in much the same way you decide whether or not to punish 
your child: If your timing is impeccable so the justification is easily 
apparent, then it can help. If you do it all the time, it's just a sign 
that you've got troubles of your own. 

Variation on a Theme by Parkinson 

A slight variation on Parkinson's Law produces something that is 
frighteningly true in many organizations: 

Organizational busy work tends to expand to fill 

the working day. 

This effect can start when the company is founded, and become 
worse every year. It's part of the reason that very mature companies 
are less fun to work for. The few remaining employees of the Dutch 
East India Company (founded in 1651 and once the largest company 
in the world) now spend forty hours a week filling out forms. 
Notice that in this case, it's the company that exhibits Parkmsonian 
behavior rather than its employees. We'll return to this theme in 
PartlL 


Chapter 6
LAETRILE


Laetrile is a colorless liquid pressed from the soft bitter insides 
of apricot pits. In Sweden, you can buy the stuff in the grocery 
store for about the price of almond extract, and you use it in baking 
much as you would any other extract. In Mexico, you can buy it for 
fifty dollars a drop to "cure" your fatal cancer. Of course, it doesn't 
cure anything. All the evidence demonstrates that it is a cruel fraud. 
But since no one else has anything at all to offer them, terminal patients 
accept the claims of the laetrile peddlers, no matter how outrageous. 
People who are desperate enough don't look very hard at the 
evidence. 

Similarly, lots of managers are "desperate enough," and their 
desperation makes them easy victims of a kind of technical laetrile 
that purports to improve productivity. There is seldom any evidence 
at all to support the claims of what they buy. They, too, dispense 
with evidence because their need is so great. 

Lose Fat While Sleeping 

One day, in a moment of high silliness, I started clipping 
ads for products that claimed to boost productivity 
by one hundred percent or more. Within a very short 
time, I had quite a pile. The amazing thing was the 
diversity of the means advertised to yield big productivity 
gains. There were seminars, packaged programs, 
methodologies, books, scheduling boards, hardware 
monitors, computing languages, and newsletters. 

30 


LAETRILE 31


Going uptown on the subway that night, I spotted one 
final ad on the back of the New York Post. It read, 
"Lose Fat While Sleeping." It seemed to fit right in 
with the others. 

_TRL 

We're all under a lot of pressure to improve productivity. The 
problem is no longer susceptible to easy solutions, because all the 
easy solutions were thought of and applied long ago. Yet some 
organizations are doing a lot better than others. We're convinced 
that those who do better are not using any particularly advanced 
technology. Their better performance can be explained entirely by 
their more effective ways of handling people, modifying the workplace 
and corporate culture, and implementing some of the measures 
that we'll discuss in Parts II through IV. The relative inefficacy of 
technology may be a bit discouraging, at least in the short run, 
because the kinds of modification to corporate culture we advocate 
are hard to apply and slow to take effect. What would be far preferable 
is the coupon you cut out of the back pages of a magazine to 
send in with a few thousand bucks, so that some marvelous 
productivity gimmick will come back to you in the mail. Of course, 
it may not do much for you, but then easy non-solutions are often 
more attractive than hard solutions. 

The Seven Sirens 

The false hopes engendered by easy technological non-solutions are 
like those Sirens that tempted poor Odysseus. Each one reaches out 
to you with her own beguiling message, an attractive fallacy that 
leads nowhere. As long as you believe them, you're going to be 
reluctant to do the hard work necessary to build a healthy corporate 
culture. 

The particular Sirens that plague you are a function of what 
industry you work in. We've identified seven from the field that we 
know best, software development, and we present them below 
along with our own responses: 

SEVEN FALSEHOPES OFSOFTWAREMANAGEMENT 

1. There is some new trick you've missed that could send productivity 
soaring. 



Response: You are simply not dumb enough to have missed 
something so fundamental. You are continually investigating 
new approaches and trying out the ones that make the 
most sense. None of the measures you've taken or are likely 
to take can actually make productivity soar. What they 
do, though, is to keep everybody healthy: People like to 
keep their minds engaged, to learn, and to improve. The 
line that there is some magical innovation out there that 
you've missed is a pure fear tactic, employed by those with 
a vested interest in selling it. 

2. Other managers are getting gains of one hundred percent or 
two hundred percent or more! 
Response: Forget it. The typical magical tool that's touted 
to you is focused on the coding and testing part of the life 
cycle. But even if coding and testing went away entirely, 
you couldn't expect a gain of one hundred percent. There is 
still all the analysis, negotiation, specification, training, 
acceptance testing, conversion, and cutover to be done. 

3. Technology is moving so swiftly that you're being passed by. 
Response: Yes, technology is moving swiftly, but (the high-
tech illusion again) most of what you're doing is not truly 
high-tech work. While the machines have changed enormously, 
the business of software development has been 
rather static. We still spend most of our time working on 
requirements and specification, the low-tech part of our 
work. Productivity within the software industry has 
improved by three to five percent a year, only marginally 
better than the steel or automobile industry. 

4. Changing languages will give you huge gains. 
Response: Languages are important because they affect the 

way you think about a problem, but again, they can have 

impact only on the implementation part of the project. 


LAETRILE 33 

Because of their exaggerated claims, some of our newer languages 
qualify as laetrile. Sure, it may be better to do a new 
application in PowerBuilder., for example, rather than 
COBOL, but even before PowerBuilder, there were better 
ways than COBOL: niche tools that make inquiry and update 
pretty easy. Unless you've been asleep at the switch for the 
past few decades, change of a language won't do much for 
you. It might give you a five percent gain (nothing to 
sneeze at), but not more. 

5. Because of the backlog, you need to double productivity 
immediately. 
Response: The much talked about software backlog is a 
myth. We all know that projects cost a lot more at the end 
than what we expected them to cost at the beginning. So the 
cost of a system that didn't get built this year (because we 
didn't have the capacity for it) is optimistically assumed to 
be half of what it would actually cost to build, or even less. 
The typical project that's stuck in the mythical backlog is 
there because it has barely enough benefit to justify building 
it, even with the most optimistic cost assumptions. If we 
knew its real cost, we'd see that project for what it is: an 
economic loser. It shouldn't be in the backlog, it should be 
in the reject pile. 

6. You automate everything else; isn't it about time you 
automated away your software development staff? 
Response: This is another variation of the high-tech illusion: 
the belief that software developers do easily automatable 
work. Their principal work is human communication 
to organize the users' expressions of needs into formal procedure. 
That work will be necessary no matter how we 
change the life cycle. And it's not likely to be automated. 


34 PEOPLEWARE 

7. Your people will work better if you put them under a lot of 
pressure. 
Response: They won't—they'll just enjoy it less. 

So far, all this is rather negative. If leaning on people is 
counterproductive, and installing the latest technological doodad 
won't help much either, then what is the manager supposed to do? 

This Is Management 

In my early years as a developer, I was privileged to 
work on a project managed by Sharon Weinberg, now 
president of the Codd and Date Consulting Group. She 
was a walking example of much of what I now think of 
as enlightened management. One snowy day, I dragged 
myself out of a sickbed to pull together our shaky system 
for a user demo. Sharon came in and found me 
propped up at the console. She disappeared and came 
back a few minutes later with a container of soup. 
After she'd poured it into me and buoyed up my spirits, 
I asked her how she found time for such things with all 
the management work she had to do. She gave me her 
patented grin and said, Tom, this is management." 

—TDM 

Sharon knew what all good instinctive managers know: The 
manager's function is not to make people work, but to make it possible 
for people to work. 


PART II
THE OFFICE ENVIRONMENT


In order to make it possible for people to work, you have to 
come to grips with those factors that sometimes make it 
The causes of lost hours and days are numerous but not so different 
from one another. They are mostly failures, in one form or another, 
of the environment that the organization has provided to help you 
work. The phone rings off the hook, the printer service man stops 
by to chat, the copier breaks down, the chap from the blood drive 
calls to revise donation times, Personnel continues to scream for the 
updated skills survey forms, time sheets are due at 3 p.mu, lots more 
phone calls come in,... and the day is gone. Some days you never 
spend a productive minute on anything having to do with getting 
actual work done. 

It wouldn't be so bad if all these diversions affected the manager 
alone, while the rest of the staff worked on peacefully. But as 
you know, it doesn't happen that way. Everybody*s work day is 
plagued with frustration and interruption. Entire days are lost, and 
nobody can put a finger on just where they went. If you wonder 
why almost everything is behind schedule, consider this: 

There are a million ways to lose a work day, but 

not even a single way to get one back. 

In Part II, we'll look into some of the causes of lost time and 
propose measures that you can take to create a healthy, work-conducive 
environment. 


Chapter 7
THE FURNITURE POLICE


Suppose that in addition to your present duties, you were 
made responsible for space and services for your people. You 
would have to decide on the kind of workplace for each person, 
and the amount of space and expense to be allocated. How would 
you go about it? You'd probably want to study the ways in which 
people use their space, the amount of table space required, and 
the number of hours in a day spent working alone, working with 
one other person, and so forth. You'd also investigate the impact 
of noise on people's effectiveness. After all, your folks are intellect 
workers—they need to have their brains in gear to do their 
work, and noise does affect their ability to concentrate. 

For each of the observed kinds of disturbance, you'd look 
for any easy, mechanical way to protect your workers. Given a 
reasonably free hand, you would investigate the advantages of 
closed space (one- and two- and three-person offices) versus open 
space. This would allow you to make a sensible trade-off of cost 
against privacy and quiet. Finally, you would take into account 
people's social needs and provide some areas where a conversation 
could take place without disturbing others. 

It should come as no surprise to you that the people who do 
control space and services for your company (particularly if it's a 
large company) don't spend much time thinking about any of the 
concerns listed above. They don't collect any raw data, they 
don't strive to understand complex issues like productivity. Part 

37



38 PEOPLEWARE 

of the reason for this is that they are not themselves doing the 
kind of work likely to suffer from a poor environment. They 
often constitute a kind of Furniture Police, whose approach to the 
problem is nearly the opposite of what your own would be. 

The Police Mentality 

The head of the Furniture Police is that fellow who wanders 
through the new office space the day before your staff is supposed 
to move in, with thoughts like these running through his head: 

"Look at how beautifully uniform everything is! You 
have no way to tell whether you're on the fifth floor or 
the sixth! But once those people move in, it will all be 
ruined. They'll hang up pictures and individualize their 
little modules, and they'll be messy. They'll probably 
want to drink coffee over my lovely carpet and even eat 
then- lunch right here (shudder). Oh dear, oh dear, oh 
dear..." 

This is the person who promulgates rules about leaving each desk 
clean at night and prohibiting anything to be hung on the partitions 
except perhaps a company calendar. The Furniture Police at 
one company we know even listed a number for spilled coffee on 
the Emergency Numbers decal affixed to every phone. We were 
never there when anyone called the number, but you could probably 
expect white-coated maintenance men to come careening 
through the halls in an electric cart with flashing lights and a siren 
going ooogah-ooogah. 

While on break at a seminar, a fellow told me that his 
company doesn't allow anything to be left on the desk 
at night except for a five-by-seven photo of the worker's 
family. Anything else and in the morning you'll find 
stuck to your desktop a nasty note (on corporate letterhead 
yet) from the Furniture Police. One guy was so 
offended by these notes that he could barely restrain 
his anger. Knowing how he felt, his fellow workers 
played a joke on him: They bought a picture frame 
from the local five~and-dime store, choosing one with a 
photograph of an all-American family as a sample. 
Then they replaced the photo of his own family with the 
other. Under the photo was what looked like a note 


THE FURNITURE POLICE 39


from the Furniture Police, stating that since his family 
didn't pass muster by the corporate standards, he was 
being issued an "official company family photo" to 
leave on his desk. 

—TRL 

The Uniform Plastic Basement 

To get a better feeling for the police mentality, look at the floor plan 
of Figure 7.1, now becoming common in organizations all over 
America: 


Figure 7.1. Typical office floor plan. 

This scheme deals forthiightly with the complicated question of who 
should have windowed space: no one. The trouble with windows 
is that there aren't enough of them to give one to every worker. If 
some people have windows and others do not, you'll be able to tell 
that you're in George's workspace, for instance, by simple observation. 
We can't have that, now, can we? 

But look at the side effect. The most frequently traveled paths, 
from elevator to cubicle or from cubicle to cubicle, do not pass in 


40 PEOPLEWARE 

front of any window. Where such floor plans are used, the windows 
are not utilized at all, the window corridors are always empty. 
We first encountered the window corridor plan on the twentieth 
floor of a new skyscraper—there were magnificent views in every 
direction, views that virtually nobody ever saw. The people in that 
building may as well have worked in a basement. 

Basement space is really preferable from the point of view of 
the Furniture Police, because it lends itself more readily to uniform 
layouts. But people work better in natural light. They feel better in 
windowed space and that feeling translates directly into higher quality 
of work. People don't want to work in a perfectly uniform space 
either. They want to shape their space to their own convenience and 
taste. These inconvenient facts are typical of a general class of inconveniences 
that come from dealing with human workers. 

Visiting a few dozen different organizations each year, as we 
do, quickly convinces you that ignoring such inconvenient facts is 
intrinsic to many office plans. Almost without exception, the 
workspaces given to intellect workers are noisy, interruptive, unprivate, 
and sterile. Some are prettier than others, but not much more 
functional. No one can get any work done there. The very person 
who could work like a beaver in a quiet little cubbyhole with two 
large folding tables and a door that shuts is given instead an EZ-
Whammo Modular Cubicle with seventy-three plastic appurtenances. 
Nobody shows much interest in whether it helps or hurts 
effectiveness. 

All this may seem a bit harsh on those solid citizens who plan 
America's office space. If you think so, consider one last manifestation 
of the mind-set of these planners. It is something so monstrous 
that you have to wonder why it's tolerated at all: the company 
paging system. Hard as this may be to believe, some companies 
actually use a public address system to interrupt perhaps thousands 
of workers, people who are trying to think, in order to locate one: 
BONG! [static] ATTENTION, ATTENTION! PAGING PAUL PORTULACA. 
WILL PAUL PORTULACA PLEASE CALL THE PAGING CENTER. 
If you position yourself well, you can sometimes see thirty or forty 
salaried workers raise their heads at the initial bong and listen politely 
through the whole message, then look down again wondering 
what they were doing before they were interrupted. 

Police-mentality planners design workplaces the way they 
would design prisons: optimized for containment at minimal cost. 
We have unthinkingly yielded to them on the subject of workplace 
design, yet for most organizations with productivity problems, there 


THE FURNITURE 

is no more fruitful area for improvement than the workplace. As 
long as workers are crowded into noisy, sterile, disruptive space,
it's not worth improving anything but the 



Chapter 8


"YOU NEVERGETANYTHING DONE
AROUND HERE BETWEEN 9 AND 5"


Part of the folklore among development workers in all sectors 
of our economy is, "Overtime is a fact of life." This implies that the 
work can never get done in the amount of time worth allocating for 
it. That seems to us a rather dubious proposition. Overtime is certainly 
a fact of life in the software industry, for example, but that 
industry could hardly have come through a period of such phenomenal 
prosperity if the software built on the whole weren't worth a lot 
more than was paid for it. How to explain then the fact that software 
people as well as workers in other thought-intensive positions 
are putting in so many extra hours? 

A disturbing possibility is that overtime is not so much a 
means to increase the quantity of work time as to improve its average 
quality. You hear evidence that this is true in such frequently 
repeated statements as these: 

"I get my best work done in the early morning, before 

anybody else arrives." 

"In one late evening, I can do two or three days' worth 

of work." 

"The office is a zoo all day, but by about 6 p.m., things 

have quieted down and you can really accomplish 

something." 


"YOUNEVERGETANYTHINGDONEAROUNDHERE..." 43


To be productive, people may come in early or stay late or even try 
to escape entirely, by staying home for a day to get a critical piece of 
work done. One of our seminar participants reported that her new 
boss wouldn't allow her to work at home, so on the day before an 
important report was due, she took a sick day to get it done. 

Staying late or arriving early or staying home to work in peace 
is a damning indictment of the office environment. The amazing 
thing is not that it's so often impossible to work in the workplace; 
the amazing thing is that everyone knows it and nobody ever does 
anything about it. 

A Policy of Default 

A California company that I consult for is very much 
concerned about being responsive to its people. Last 
year, the company's management conducted a survey in 
which all programmers (more than a thousand) were 
asked to list the best and the worst aspects of their 
jobs. The manager who ran the survey was very excited 
about the changes the company had undertaken. He 
told me that the number two problem was poor communication 
with upper management. Having learned 
that from the survey, the company set up quality circles, 
gripe sessions, and other communication programs. 
I listened politely as he described them in 
detail. When he was done, I asked what the number one 
problem was. "The environment," he replied. 
"People were upset about the noise." I asked what 
steps the company had taken to remedy that problem. 
"Oh, we couldn't do anything about that," he said. 
"That's outside our control," 

—JDM 

All the more discouraging is that the manager wasn't even 
particularly embarrassed about failing to take steps to improve the 
environment. It was as though the programmers had complained 
that there was too much gravity, and management had decided after 
due reflection that they couldn't really do much about it; it was a 
problem whose solution was beyond human capacity. This is a 
policy of total default 

Changing the environment is not beyond human capacity. 
Granted, there is a power group in almost every company, a Furni



44 PEOPLEWARE 

ture Police group, that has domain over the physical environment. 
But it's not impossible to make them see reason or to wrest control 
away from them. For the rest of this chapter, we'll present some of 
the reasons why you're going to have to do exactly that. In subsequent 
chapters, we'll give some hints about how to go about it 

Coding War Games: Observed Productivity Factors 

Beginning in 1977, we have conducted some sort of a public productivity 
survey each year. So far, more than three hundred organizations 
worldwide have participated in these studies. From 1984 
on, we have run our annual survey as a sort of public competition in 
which teams of software implementors from different organizations 
compete to complete a series of benchmark coding and testing tasks 
in minimal time and with minimal defects. We call these competitions 
Coding War Games. Here's how they work: 

. The basic competing unit is a pair of implementors from the 
same organization. The pair members do not work together, 
but in fact members work against each other as well as against 
all the other pairs. 
. Both pair members perform exactly the same work, designing, 
coding, and testing a medium-sized program to our fixed 
specification. 
. As they go through the exercise, participants record the time 
spent on a time log. 
. After all participant testing is completed, the products are subjected 
to our standard acceptance test 
. Participants work in their own work areas during normal work 
hours using the same languages, tools, terminals, and computers 
that they use for any other project. 
. All results are kept confidential. 
From 1984 to 1986, more than 600 developers from 92 companies 
have participated in the games. The benefit to the individual 
is learning how he or she compares with the rest of the competitors. 


"YOU NEVER GET ANYTHING DONE AROUND ..." 45 

The benefit to the company is learning how well it does against other 
companies in the sample. And the benefit to us is learning a lot 
about what factors affect productivitys factors discussed in the 
of this chapter. 

Individual Differences 

One of the first results of the coding wars was proof of a huge difference 
between competing individuals. Of course, this had been 
observed before. Figure 8.1, for example, is a composite of the 
findings from three different sources on the extent of variation 
among individuals: 


Figure 8.1. Productivity variation among individuals. 

Three rales of thumb seem to apply whenever you measure variations 
in performance over a sample of individuals: 

. Count on the best people outperforming the worst by about 
10:1. 
. Count on the best performer being about 2.5 times better than 
the median performer. 
. Count on the half that are better-than-median performers outdoing 
the other half by more than 2:1. 

50 PEOPLEWARE 

The top quartile, those who did the exercise most rapidly and 
effectively, work in space that is substantially different from that of 
the bottom quartile. The-top performers' space is quieter, more private, 
better protected from interruption, and there is more of it 

What Did We Prove? 

The data presented above does not exactly prove that a better workplace 
will help people to perform better. It may only indicate that 
people who perform better tend to gravitate toward organizations 
that provide a better workplace. Does that really matter to you? In 
the long run, what difference does it make whether quiet, space, and 
privacy help your current people to do better work or help you to 
attract andkeep betterpeople? 

If we proved anything at all, it's that a policy of default on 
workplace characteristics is a mistake. If you participate in or manage 
a team of people who need to use their brains during the work 
day, then the workplace environment is your business. It isn't 
enough to observe, "You never get anything done around here 
between 9 and 5," and then turn your attention to something else. 
It's dumb that people can't get work done during normal work 
hours. It's time to do something about it 


Chapter 9
SAVING MONEY ON SPACE


If your organization is anything like those studied in our last 
three annual surveys, the environmental trend is toward less 
privacy, less dedicated space, and more noise. Of course, the 
obvious reason for this is cost. A penny saved on the workspace 
is a penny earned on the bottom line, or so the logic goes. Those 
who make such a judgment are guilty of performing a cost/benefit 
study without benefit of studying the benefit. They know the cost 
but haven't any idea what the other side of the equation may be. 
Sure, the savings of a cost-reduced workplace are attractive, but 
compared to what? The obvious answer is that the savings have to 
be compared to the risk of lost effectiveness. 

Given the current assault on workplace costs, it's surprising 
how little the potential savings are compared to the potential risk. 
The entire cost of workspace for one developer is a small percentage 
of the salary paid to the developer. How small depends on 
such factors as real-estate values, salary levels, and lease versus 
buy tactics. In general, it varies in the range from 6 to 16 percent. 
For a programmer/analyst working in company-owned space, you 
should expect to pay $15 directly to the worker for every dollar 
you spend on space and amenities. If you add the cost for 
employee benefits, the total investment in the worker could easily 
be 20 times the cost of his or her workplace. 

The 20:1 ratio implies that workplace cost reduction is risky. 
Attempts to save a small portion of the one dollar may cause you to 
sacrifice a large portion of the twenty. The prudent manager could 

51



52 PEOPLEWARE 

not consider moving people into cheaper, noisier, and more crowded 
quarters without first assessing whether worker effectiveness 
would be impaired. So, you might expect that the planners who 
have undertaken a decade-long program to change our office space 
into the voguish open-plan format must first have done some very 
careful productivity analysis. Not to do so would have demonstrated 
an irresponsible unconcern for the environment 

A Plague Upon the Land 

Irresponsible unconcern for the environment is, unfortunately, the 
norm for our times. We show it in the despoliation of our natural 
resources, so why not in workplace design? In a prophetic science 
fiction story, John Brunner describes pollution of the air, soil, and 
water continuing through the end of the twentieth century. No matter 
how bad the pollution gets, almost no one complains. Like a 
vast herd of imperturbable sheep, the inhabitants of Brunner's world 
try to ignore the problem until, finally, all possibility for survival is 
lost. Then and only then do they take notice. Brunner called his 
book The Sheep Look Up. 

American office workers have barely looked up while their 
work quarters have been degraded from sensible to silly. Not so 
long ago, they worked in two- and three-person offices with walls, 
doors, and windows. (You remember walls, doors, and windows, 
don't you?) In such space, one could work in quiet or conduct 
meetings with colleagues without disrupting neighbors. 

Then, without warning, open-plan seating was upon us like a 
plague upon the land. The advocates of the new format produced 
not one shred of evidence that effectiveness would not be impaired. 
They really couldn't. Meaningful measurement of productivity is a 
complex and elusive thing. It has to be performed differently in 
each different work sector. It takes expertise, careful study, and lots 
of data collection. 

The people who brought us open-plan seating simply weren't 
up to the task. But they talked a good game. They sidestepped the 
issue of whether productivity might go down by asserting very 
loudly that the new office arrangement would cause productivity to 
go up, and up a lot, by as much as three hundred percent. They 
published articles, many of them crafted from the purest sculpted 
smoke. They gave their pronouncements impressive titles like this 
one from Data Management magazine: "Open-Plan DP Environment 


SAVING MONEY ON SPACE 53 

Boosts Employee Productivity." After that promising title, the 
author got right to the heart of the matter: 

The fundamental areas of consideration in designing an 
open-plan office within an information processing environment 
are: the system's electrical distribution 
capabilities, computer support capabilities and manufacturer 
and dealer service. 

Period. That's it. That's all of the "fundamental areas of consideration." 
No mention of the fact that a person is going to be trying to 
work in that space. 

Also missing from that article and from others like it is any 
notion of what employee productivity is all about. There was no 
evidence in the Data Management article to support the title. The 
only method we have ever seen used to confirm claims that the open 
plan improvesproductivity isproof byrepeated assertion. 

We Interrupt This Diatribe to Bring You a Few Facts 

Before drawing the plans for its new Santa Teresa facility, IBM 
violated all industry standards by carefully studying the work habits 
of those who would occupy the space. The study was designed by 
the architect Gerald McCue with the assistance of IBM area managers. 
Researchers observed the work processes in action in current 
workspaces and in mock-ups of proposed workspaces. They 
watched programmers, engineers, quality control workers, and 
managers go about their normal activities. From their studies, they 
concluded that a minimum accommodation for the mix of people 
slated to occupy the new space would be the following: 

. 100 square feet of dedicated space per worker 
. 30 square feet of work surface per person 
. noise protection in the form of enclosed offices or six-foot 
high partitions (they ended up with about half of all professional 
personnel in enclosed one- and two-person 
offices) 



The rationale for building the new laboratory to respect these 
minimums was simple: People in the roles studied needed the space 
and quiet in order to perform optimally. Cost reduction to provide 
workspace below the minimum would result in a loss of effectiveness 
that would more than offset the cost savings. Other studies 
have looked into the same questions and come up with more or less 
the same answers. The McCue study was different only in one 
respect: IBM actually followed the recommendations and built a 
workplace where people can work. (We predict this company will 
gofar.)

How does the rest of the world match up to IBM's minimum 
standard workplace? Figure 9.1 shows a distribution of dedicated 
space per person computed across participants in our 1984 and 1985 
surveys. 


DEDICATED SPACE 

(SQUARE FEET/PERSON) 

Figure 9.1. Range of dedicated floor space. 

Only 16 percent of participants had 100 square feet or more of 
workspace. Only 11 percent of participants worked in enclosed 
offices or with greater than 6-foot high partitions. There were more 
participants in the 20-to 30-square-foot group than in the 100square-
foot group. (With less than 30 square feet, you're trying to 
work in a total floor space less than the table space provided at Santa 
Teresa.) 


SAVING MONEY ON SPACE 55 

Across the whole Coding War Games sample, 58 percent 
complained that their workplace was not acceptably quiet; 61 percent 
complained that it wasn't sufficiently private; 54 percent reported 
that they had a workplace at home that was better than the workplace 
provided by the company. 

Workplace Quality and Product Quality 

Companies that provide a small and noisy workplace are comforted 
by the belief that these factors don't really matter. They explain 
away all the complaints about noise, for instance, as workers campaigning 
for the added status of bigger, more private space. After 
all, what difference could a little noise make? It's just something to 
help keep people awake. 

In order to determine whether attitude toward noise level had 
any correlation to work, we divided our sample into two parts, those 
who found the workplace acceptably quiet and those who didn't 
Then we looked at the number of workers within each group who 
had completed the entire exercise without a single defect. 

Workers who reported before the exercise that their 

workplace was acceptably quiet were one-third more 

likely to deliver zero-defect work. 

As the noise level gets worse, this trend seems to get stronger. 
For example, one company that was represented by 50 participants 
had an unacceptable noise rating 22 percent higher than average. At 
that company, those who did zero-defect work came disproportionately 
from the subset who found the noise level acceptable: 

Zero-defect workers: 66 percent reported noise level okay 

One-or-more-defect workers: 8 percent reported noise level okay 

Again, as with the other environmental correlations, we asked that 
participants assess the noise level in their environments before performing 
the exercise. 

Note that we made no objective measurements of noise levels. 
We simply asked people whether they found the noise level acceptable 
or not. As a result, we cannot distinguish between those who 
worked in a genuinely quiet workplace and those who were well 
adapted to (not bothered by) a noisy workplace. But when a worker 
complains about noise, he's telling you he doesn't fit into either of 


56 PEOPLEWARE 

those fortunate subsets. He's telling you that he is likely to bedefect-prone. You ignore that message at your peril. 

A Discovery of Nobel Prize Significance 

Some days people are just more highly perceptive than other days. 
For us, a landmark day for perceptiveness was February 3, 1984, 
when we began to notice a remarkable relationship between people 
density and dedicated floor space per person. As the one goes up, 
the other seems to go down! Careful researchers that we are, we 
immediately began to document the trend. In a study of 32,346 
companies throughout the Free World, we confirmed a virtuallyperfect inverse relationshipbetween thetwo: 


Figure 9.2. The DeMarco/Llster Effect. 

Imagine our excitement as the data points were collected. We experienced 
some of the thrill that Ohm must have felt when discovering 
his law. This was truly the stuff of which Nobel Prizes are made. 
Remember that you saw it here first: Worker density (say, workers 
per thousand square feet) is inversely proportional to dedicated 
space per person.

If you're having trouble seeing why this matters, you're not 
thinking about noise. Noise is directly proportional to density, so 


SAVING MONEY ON SPACE 57 

halving the allotment of space per person can be expected to double 
the noise. Even if you managed to prove conclusively that a programmer 
could work in 30 square feet of space without being hopelessly 
space-bound, you still wouldn't be able to conclude that 30 
square feet is adequate space. The noise in a 30-square-foot matrix 
is more than three times the noise in a 100-square-foot matrix. That 
could mean the difference between a plague of product defects and 
none at all. 

Hiding Out 

When the office environment is frustrating enough, people look for 
a place to hide out. They book the conference rooms or head for the 
library or wander off for coffee and just don't come back. No, they 
are not meeting for secret romance or plotting political coups; they 
are hiding out to work. The good news here is that your people 
really do need to feel the accomplishment of work completed. They 
will go to great extremes to make that happen. When the crunch is 
on, people will try to find workable space no matter where. 

In my college years at Brown University, the trick for 
getting through the mad season when all the papers 
came due was to find some place quiet to work. At 
Brown, we had a system of carrels in the library 
stacks. The only acceptable interruption there was a 
fire alarm, and it had to be for a real Tire. We got to be 
experts at finding out-of-the-way carrels where no 
one would ever think to look for us. The fifth-floor 
carrels of the Bio Library were my favorite, but a 
friend even went so far as to work in the crypt below 
the American Library—yes, the crypt, complete with 
the remains of the woman who had endowed the building. 
It was cool, it was marble, and as my friend 
reported, it was quiet, very quiet. 

—TRL 

If you peek into a conference room, you may find three people 
working in silence. If you wander to the cafeteria mid-afternoon, 
you're likely to find folks seated, one to a table, with their work 
spread out before them. Some of your workers can't be found at 
all. People are hiding out to get some work done. If this rings true 
to your organization, it's an indictment. Saving money on space 
may be costing you a fortune. 


INTERMEZZO


An intermezzo is a fanciful digression inserted between 
the pages of an otherwise serious work (oh, well, 
fairly serious work). 

PRODUCTIVITY MEASUREMENT AND
UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECTS


Why can't we just measure productivity in good and bad 
workplaces and finally nail down the relationship between the 
environment and worker effectiveness? That approach would certainly 
be suitable for an assembly line, but when the work being 
measured is of a more intellectual nature, it's not so obvious. Measurement 
of intellect-worker productivity suffers from a reputation 
of being a soft science. In some people's minds, it's little better 
than the study ofunidentified flying objects.

An experiment to test the effect of the workplace on productivity 
is easy enough to design: 

. measure the amount of work completed in the new workplace 
. measure the cost of doing that work 
. compare the size and cost in the new workplace to the size 
and cost in the old 
Design was easy, the implementation is harder: For instance, how 
do you assess the amount of work involved in a market study or in anew circuit design or in the development of a new loan policy? 
There may be some emerging standards (as there are in the software 
industry, for instance), but these are sure to require extensive local 
data collection and the building of in-house expertise. Most organi



INTERMEZZO 59 

zations don't even attempt to measure the amount of intellect work 
performed. They don't measure costs very effectively either. 

There may be statistics on the total quantity of hours applied to 
a given problem within an organization, but no indication of the 
quality of these hours (more about this in Chapter 10). And even if 
organizations could measure size and cost in a new workplace, they 
would have no past figures to compare them to. Managers are likely 
to furrow their brows over this problem, sigh, and conclude that 
variation in productivity is beyond comprehension. But it's really 
not as bad as that. 

Gilb's Law 

Two years ago at a conference In London, I spent an 
afternoon with Tom Gilb, the author of Software 
Metrics and dozens of published papers on measurement 
of the development process. I found that an easy 
way to get him heated up was to suggest that something 
you need to know is "unmeasurable." The man was 
offended by the very idea. He favored me that day with 
a description of what he considered a fundamental truth 
about measurability. The idea seemed at once so wise 
and so encouraging that I copied it verbatim into my 
journal under the heading of Gilb's Law: 

Anything you need to quantify can be 
measured In some way that Is superior to 
not measuring it at all. 

Gilb's Law doesn't promise you that measurement will 
be free or even cheap, and it may not be perfect—just 
better than nothing. 

—TDM 

Of course it's possible to measure productivity. If you convoke 
a group of people doing the same or similar work and give 
them a day to work out a sensible self-measurement scheme, they 
will come up with something that confirms Gilb's Law. The numbers 
they then generate will give them some way to tune their own 
performance and, when combined with quality circles or some other 
peer review mechanism, a way to learn from each other's methods. 
The averages computed over the group will give management a reli



60 PEOPLEWARE 

able indicator of the effect of such parameters as improvement in the 
office environment 

In the field that we know best, software construction, there are 
any number of workable productivity measurement schemes, such 
as those listed in the Notes. There is even a service that will come in 
and assess your productivity and show you where you stand compared 
to the rest of the industry. An organization that can't make 
some assessment of its own programming productivity rate just 
hasn't tried hard enough. 

But You Can't Afford Not to Know 

Suppose there were a foolproof productivity measurement tool and it 
was being applied to your people's work this very moment. Suppose 
the measurers came in to tell you that your productivity was in 
the top five percent of organizations doing your kind of work. 
You'd be pleased. You'd wander around the halls with a secret 
smile, thinking warm thoughts about your people: "I suspected they 
were pretty good, but this is terrific news." 

Ooops. The measurers have just come back to tell you that 
they must have been holding the graph upside down when they gave 
you the first report. You're actually in the bottom five percent. Now 
your day is ruined. You find yourself thinking, "I might have 
known it all along. Who could expect to get any work done with 
turkeys like these on the staff?" In the one case you're ecstatic, in 
the other despondent. But in neither case are you particularly surprised. 
You're not likely to be surprised no matter what the news 
is, because you haven't the foggiest idea what your productivity is. 

Given that there are ten to one differences from one organization 
to another, you simply can't afford to remain ignorant of 
where you stand. Your competition may be ten times more effective 
than you are in doing the same work. If you don't know it, you 
can't begin to do something about it. Only the market will understand. 
It will take steps of its own to rectify the situation, steps that 
do not bode well for you. 

Measuring with Your Eyes Closed 

Work measurement can be a useful tool for method improvement, 
motivation, and enhanced job satisfaction, but it is almost never 
used for these purposes. Measurement schemes tend to become 
threatening and burdensome. 


INTERMEZZO 61 

In order to make the concept deliver on its potential, management 
has to be perceptive and secure enough to cut itself out of the 
loop. That means the data on individuals is not passed up to management, 
and everybody in the organization knows it. Data 
collected on the individual's performance has to be used only to 
benefit that individual. The measurement scheme is an exercise in 
self-assessment, and only the sanitized averages are made available 
to the boss. 

This concept is a hard one to swallow for many managers. 
They reason that they could use the data to do some aspects of their 
work more effectively (precision promotion, for example, or even 
precision firing). Their company has paid to have the data collected, 
so why shouldn't it be made available to them? But collection of 
this very sensitive data on the individual can only be effected with 
the active and willing cooperation of the individual. If ever its confidentiality 
is compromised, if ever the data is used against even one 
individual, the entire data collection scheme will come to an abrupt 
halt. 

The individuals are inclined to do exactly the same things with 
the data that the manager would do. They will try to improve the 
things they do less well or try to specialize in the areas where they 
already excel. In the extreme case, an individual may even "fire" 
himself in order to stop depending on skills that have been found to 
be deficient The manager doesn't really need the individual data in 
order to benefit from it. 


Chapter 10


BRAIN TIMEVERSUS
BODY TIME


As part of the Santa Teresa pre-construction study described in 
Chapter 9, McCue and his associates looked into the amounts of 
time that developers spend in different work modes. For a typical 
day, they concluded that workers divide their time as follows: 

Table 10.1 
How Developers Spend Their Time 

PERCENT 
WORK MODE OF TIME 


Working alone 30% 
Working with one other person 50% 
Working with two or more people 20% 

The significance of this table from a noise standpoint should 
be evident: Thirty percent of the time, people are noise sensitive, 
and the rest of the time, they are noise generators. Since the workplace 
is a mixture of people working alone and people working 
together, there is a clash of modes. Those working alone are particularly 
inconvenienced by this clash. Though they represent a minority 
at any given time, it's a mistake to ignore them, for it is dur



BRAIN TIME VERSUS BODY TIME 63 

ing their solitary work periods that people actually do the work. The 
rest of the time is dedicated to subsidiary activities, rest, and chatter, 

Flow 

During single-minded work time, people are ideally in a state that 
psychologists call flow. Flow is a condition of deep, nearly 
meditative involvement. In this state, there is a gentle sense of euphoria, 
and one is largely unaware of the passage of time: "I began 
to work. I looked up, and three hours had passed." There is no 
consciousness of effort; the work just seems to, well, flow. You've 
been in this state often, so we don't have to describe it to you. 

Not all work roles require that you attain a state of flow in 
order to be productive, but for anyone involved in engineering, 
design, development, writing, or like tasks, flow is a must. These 
are high-momentum tasks. It's only when you're in flow that the 
work goes well. 

Unfortunately, you can't turn on flow like a switch. It takes a 
slow descent into the subject, requiring fifteen minutes or more of 
concentration before the state is locked in. During this immersion 
period, you are particularly sensitive to noise and interruption. A 
disruptive environment can make it difficult or impossible to attain 
flow. 

Once locked in, the state can be broken by an interruption that 
is focused on you (your phone, for instance) or by insistent noise 
("Attention! Paging Paul Portulaca. Will Paul Portulaca please call 
extension..."). Each time you're interrupted, you require an additional 
immersion period to get back into flow. During this immersion, 
you're not really doing work. 

An Endless State of No-Flow 

If the average incoming phone call takes five minutes and your 
reimmersion period is fifteen minutes, the total cost of that call in 
flow time (work time) lost is twenty minutes. A dozen phone calls 
use up half a day. A dozen other interruptions and the rest of the 
work day is gone. This is what guarantees, "You never get anything 
done around here between 9 and 5." 




Just as important as the loss of effective time is the accompanying 
frustration. The worker who tries and tries to get into flow 
and is interrupted each time is not a happy person. He gets tantalizingly 
close to involvement only to be bounced back into awareness 
of his surroundings. Instead of the deep mindfulness that he 
craves, he is continually channeled into the promiscuous changing 
of direction that the modern office tries to force upon him. Put 
yourself in the position of the participant who filled out her Coding 
War Games time sheet with these entries: 

WORK PERIOD TYPE OF WHAT INTERRUPTION CAUSED THE 
FROM—TO WORK END OF THIS WORK PERIOD? 


2:13-2:17 Coding Phone call 

2:20 -2:23 Coding Boss stopped in to chat 
2:26 -2:29 Coding Question from colleague
2:31-2:39 Coding Phone call
2:41 -2:44 Coding Phone call 
Figure 10.1. Segment of a CWG time sheet. 

A few days like that and anybody is ready to look for a new 
job. If you're a manager, you may be relatively unsympathetic to 
the frustrations of being in no-flow. After all, you do most of your 
own work in interrupt mode—that's management—but the people 
who work for you need to get into flow. Anything that keeps them 
from it will reduce their effectiveness and the satisfaction they take 
in their work. It will also increase the cost of getting the work done. 

Time Accounting Based on Flow 

Chances are, your company's present time accounting system is 
based on a conventional model. It assumes that work accomplished 
is proportional to the number of paid hours put in. When workers 
fill out their time sheets in this scheme, they make no distinction 
between hours spent doing meaningful work and hours of pure 
frustration. So they're reporting body time rather than brain time. 

To make matters worse, the task accounting data is also used 
for payroll purposes. This compels employees to make sure that the 
total number of hours logged always balances out to some predeter



BRAIN TIME VERSUS BODY TIME 65 

mined total for the week, regardless of how much overtime or 
undertime they put in. The resultant compilation of official fictions 
may be acceptable to the Payroll Department: It is equivalent to the 
worker responding "Present" to a roll call. But for any productivity 
assessment or analysis of where the money went, this record is too 
badly tainted to be useful. 

The phenomena of flow and immersion give us a more realistic 
way to model how time is applied to a development task. What 
matters is not the amount of time you're present, but the amount of 
time that you're -working at full potential. An hour in flow really 
accomplishes something, but ten six-minute work periods sandwiched 
between eleven interruptions won't accomplish anything. 

The mechanics of a flow accounting system are not very complex. 
Instead of logging hours, people log uninterrupted hours. In 
order to get honest data, you have to remove the onus from logging 
too few uninterrupted hours. People have to be assured that it's not 
their fault if they can only manage one or two uninterrupted hours a 
week; rather it's the organization's fault for not providing a flow-
conducive environment. Of course, none of this data can go to the 
Payroll Department. You'll still have to retain some body-present 
time reporting for payroll purposes. 

A task accounting scheme that records flow hours instead of 
body-present hours can give you two huge benefits: First, it focuses 
your people's attention on the importance of flow time. If they 
learn that each work day is expected to afford them at least two or 
three hours free from interruption, they will take steps to protect 
those hours. The resultant interrupt-consciousness helps to protect 
them from casual interruption by peers. 

Second, it creates a record of how meaningful time is applied 
to the work. If a product is projected to require three thousand flow 
hours to complete, then you've got a valid reason to believe you're 
two-thirds done when two thousand flow hours have been logged 
against it. That kind of analysis would be foolish and dangerous 
with body-present hours. 

The E-Factor 

If you buy the idea that a good environment ought to afford workers 
the possibility of working in flow, the collection of uninterrupted-
hour data can give you some meaningful metric evidence ofjust how 
good or bad your environment is. Whenever the number of 


66 PEOPLEWARE 

uninterrupted hours is a reasonably high proportion of total hours, 
up to approximately forty percent, then the environment is allowing 
people to get into flow when they need to. Much lower numbers 
imply frustration and reduced effectiveness. We call this metric the 
Environmental Factor or E-Factor: 

Uninterrupted Hours 

E-Factor = 
Body-Present Hours 

A somewhat surprising result of collecting E-Factor data is 
that factors vary within an organization from site to site. For example, 
we recorded E-Factors as high as 0.38 and as low as 0.10 in 
one large government agency. The agency's head assured us that 
the physical environment had to remain as it was, no matter how 
bad, because characteristics of the workplace were determined by 
government policy and by civil service level. In spite of this, we 
found some sites where workers were housed in a tight, noisy open 
office plan, and others where workers doing the same job and at the 
same level worked in pleasant four-person offices. Not so surprising 
was the finding that E-Factors were markedly higher in the four-
person offices. 

E-Factors can be threatening to the status quo. (Perhaps 
you'd better not even start collecting the data.) If you report 0.38 
for a sensible space and 0.10 for a cost-reduced space, for example, 
people are likely to conclude that the cost reduction didn't make 
much sense. Workers in the 0.10 space will have to put in 3.8 times 
as much body-present time to do a given piece of work as those in 
the 0.38 space. That means having work done in the cost-reduced 
space could result in a performance penalty that is far greater than 
the space savings. Clearly, such a heretical line of reasoning must 
be suppressed. Otherwise we jeopardize all those wonderful 
"savings" to be gained by tightening up your workers' spaces. 
Burn this book before anyone else sees it. 

A Garden of Bandannas 

When you first start measuring the E-Factor, don't be surprised if it 
hovers around zero. People may even laugh at you for trying to 
record uninterrupted hours: "There is no such thing as an uninter



BRAIN TIME VERSUS BODY TIME 67 

rupted hour in this madhouse." Don't despair. Remember that 
you're not just collecting data, you're helping to change people's 
attitudes. By regularly noting uninterrupted hours, you are giving 
official sanction to the notion that people ought to have at least some 
interrupt-free time. That makes it permissible to hide out, to ignore 
the phone, or to close the door (if, sigh, there is a door). 

At one of our client sites, there was a nearly organic phenomenon 
of red bandannas on dowels suddenly sprouting from the 
desks after a few weeks of E-Factor data collection. No one in 
power had ever suggested that device as an official Do Not Disturb 
signal; it just happened by consensus. But everyone soon learned 
its significance and respected it. 

Of course, there have always been certain cranky souls who 
have stuck up Do Not Disturb signs. Peer pressure makes it hard 
for most of us to show that interruptions aren't welcome, even for a 
part of the day. A little emphasis on the E-Factor helps to change 
the corporate culture and make it acceptable to be uninterruptable. 

Thinking on the Job 

In my years at Bell Labs, we worked in two-person 
offices. They were spacious, quiet, and the phones 
could be diverted. I shared my office with Wendl 
Thomis who went on to build a small empire as an 
electronic toy maker. In those days, he was working on 
the ESS fault dictionary. The dictionary scheme relied 
upon the notion of n-space proximity, a concept that 
was hairy enough to challenge even Wendl's powers of 
concentration. One afternoon, I was bent over a program 
listing while Wendl was staring into space, his 
feet propped up on the desk. Our boss came in and 
asked, "Wendll What are you doing?" Wendl said, 
"I'm thinking." And the boss said, "Can't you do that 
at home?" 

—TDM 

The difference between that Bell Labs environment and a typical 
modern-day office plan is that in those quiet offices, one at least had 
the option of thinking on the job. In most of the office space we 
encounter today, there is enough noise and interruption to make any 
serious thinking virtually impossible. More is the shame: Your 


68 PEOPLEWARE 

people bring their brains with them every morning. They could put 
them to work for you at no additional cost if only there were a small 
measure of peace and quiet in the workplace. 


Chapter 11
THE TELEPHONE


When you begin to collect data about the quality of work time, 
your attention is automatically focused on one of the principal causes 
of interruption, the incoming telephone call. It's nothing to field 
fifteen calls in a day. It may be nothing, but because of the associated 
reimmersion time, it can use up most of that day. When the 
day is over and you're wondering where the time went, you can 
seldom even remember who called you or why. Even if some of the 
calls were important, they may not have been worth interrupting 
your flow. But who's got the nerves to wait out a ringing phone? 
The very thought of it makes you tense between the shoulders. 

Visit to an Alternate Reality 

Now just relax and imagine a less complicated world in which the 
phone has not yet been invented. In such a world, you write a note 
to propose lunch or a meeting and you get a note in response. 
Everyone plans ahead a little bit more. It's common to take half an 
hour in the morning to read and answer your mail. There are no 
loud bells in your life. 

Wednesday mornings in this alternate reality are dedicated to 
meetings of your company's pension trust investment committee. 
Imagine for the moment you are one of the employee representatives 
charged with watching where the money is placed. On this particular 
Wednesday, an inventor is scheduled to make a presentation to 
the committee. The inventor has plans to change the world, if only 
you'll invest in his new contraption. His name is A.G. Bell. 

69 




"Ladies and Gentlemen, this is the BellOPhone!" (The man 
unwraps a large black box with a crank on the side and an enormous 
bell attached to the top.) 'This is the future. We're going to put one 
of these on every desk in America. Homes, too! It will get to the 
point where people can hardly imagine a world without them." 

As he warms up to his subject, he begins gesticulating 
enthusiastically and hopping around the room to make his points. 
"BellOPhones everywhere you look, all of them hooked up together 
with wires under the street or overhead. And now this is the really 
exciting part: You can get your BellOPhone specifically connected 
to somebody else's BellOPhone, even though it may be all the way 
across the city or maybe in some other city. And when you've 
connected itjust by entering the code, you can make the bellring on 
the other fellow's machine. Not just some rinky-dink bell, either, 
but a real heart-stopper." 

He sets up a second device and connects it to the first, on the 
other side of the room. By manipulating a dial on the face of the 
first, he causes the other machine to come alive. It gives off a loud 
BRRRRINNNNNNNGGGGGGG! Afterhalfasecond, itrings againand 
then again and again, deafeningly. 

"Now, what's a fellow got to do to stop this ringing? He's 
got to race over to his BellOPhone and pick up the receiver." He 
picks up the receiver on the ringing device and hands it to one of the 
committee members. Then he bounds back to the other side of the 
room and starts shouting into the mouthpiece of the originating 
device. "Hello! Hello! Can you hear me? See that, I've got his 
complete attention. Now I can sell him something, or get him to 
lend me money or try to change his religion or whatever I want!" 

The committee is stunned. You raise your hand and venture a 
question, "Since nobody could possibly have missed the first ring, 
why bother to repeat it?" 

"Ah, that's the beauty of the BellOPhone," says A.G. "It 
never gives you the chance to wonder whether you want to answer it 
or not. No matter what you're involved in at the time it rings, no 
matter how engrossed you are, you drop everything to answer it. 
Otherwise, you know it will just keep on ringing. We're going to 
sell billions of these things and never ever allow any to be sold that 
ring only once." 

The committee goes into a huddle, but it doesn't take very 
long to come up with a judgment. You all decide without a dissenting 
voice to throw this turkey out the door. The device is so 
disruptive that if you were ever dumb enough to allow it to be 


THE TELEPHONE 71 

installed, nobody would ever get any work done around the office. 
A few years' effect of the BellOPhone and we'd all be reduced to 
buying goods from Taiwan and Korea. And our country might even 
have a negative balance of trade. 

Tales from the Crypt 

Of course, there's no turning the calendar back. The telephone is 
here to stay. You can't get rid of it, nor would you probably want 
to. You certainly can't remove phones from people's desks without 
causing them to revolt. But there are certain steps that can be taken 
to minimize the negative impact of interruptive calls. The most important 
of these is to realize how much we have allowed the telephone 
to dominate our time allocation. 

Do you often interrupt a discussion with co-workers or friends 
to answer a phone? Of course you do. You don't even consider not 
answering the phone. Yet what you're doing is a violation of the 
common rules of fairness, taking people out of order, just because 
theyinsist loudly(BBBRRRRHINNNNGGGGG!) onyour attention. Not 
only do you do this to others, you let them do it to you. And you're 
so inured to this abuse that you hardly take note of it. Only in the 
most outrageous cases is it clear that something is definitely wrong 
with such behavior: 

Nearly twenty years ago, I was standing in line at the 

parts department of the New York dealer for Morgan 

Motorcars Limited. I had a non-functioning Morgan 

(the only kind) and was hoping to get some new 

carburetor needles. People who drive British sports 

cars are undoubtedly masochists, but the treatment in 

that parts line was just too much. The clerk took one 

phone call after another while everyone in line waited. 

When I got to the head of the line, he took four calls in 

quick succession before I could get in a single word. I 

began thinking, Why should people calling from the 

comfort of their homes get priority over those of us 

standing here in this stupid line? Why should those 

mere window shoppers be taken ahead of customers 

with money in their hands, ready to buy? In a state of 

pure red rage, I suggested that he let the phone ring 

for a while and take people ahead of bells. To my 




surprise, he was more annoyed by my behavior than I 
was by his. He informed me very huffily that phones 
get priority over people, and that was all there was to 
it. My not liking it was as pointless as not liking the 
Atlantic Ocean. The facts of life weren't going to change 
just to suit me. 

—TDM 

It is natural that the telephone should have reshaped somewhat 
the way we do business, but it ought not to have blinded us to the 
effects of the interruptions. At the least, managers ought to be alert 
to the effect that interruption can have on their own people who are 
trying to get something done. But often, it's the manager who is the 
worst offender. One of the programmers in the 1985 Coding War 
Games wrote on his environmental survey, "When my boss is out, 
he has his calls switched to me." What could that manager have 
been thinking? What was going on in the mind of the systems 
department head who wrote mis in a memo: 

"It has come to my attention that many of you, when you 
are busy, are letting your phones ring for three rings and 
thus get switched over to one of the secretaries. With all 
these interruptions, the secretaries can never get any 
productive work done. The official policy here is that 
when you're at your desk you will answer your phone 
before the third ring " 

A Modified Telephone Ethic 

Enough is enough. The path toward sanity in working conditions is 
a new attitude toward interruptions and toward the telephone. People 
who are charged with getting work done must have some peace 
and quiet to do it in. That means periods of total freedom from 
interruptions. When they want to work in flow, they have to have 
some efficient, acceptable way of ignoring incoming calls. 
"Acceptable" means the corporate culture realizes that people may 
sometimes choose to be unavailable for interruption by phone. 
"Efficient" means that they don't have to wait out the bell in order to 
get back to work. 

There are workable schemes to help people free themselves 
from phones and other interruptions when they find it necessary. 


THE TELEPHONE 73 

(Some of these cost money, and thus will be possible only in 
organizations whose long-term view extends beyond next 
Tuesday.) 

When electronic mail was first proposed, most of us thought 
that the great value of it would be the saving in paper. That turns 
out to be trivial, however, compared to the saving in reimmersion 
time. The big difference between a phone call and an electronic 
mail message is that the phone call interrupts and the e-mail does 
not; the receiver deals with it at his or her own convenience. The 
amount of traffic going through these systems proves that priority 
"at the receiver's convenience" is acceptable for the great majority 
of business communications. After a period of acclimatization, 
workers begin to use electronic mail in preference to intra-company 
calls. It doesn't make all the calls go away, only most. 

You probably have the technology already. Most of us now 
have perfectly acceptable voice-mail and e-mail. The trick isn't 
in the technology; it is in the changing of habits. (Gentle reader, 
please note this recurring theme.) We have to learn to ask. Does 
this news or this question deserve an interrupt? Can I continue to 
get work done while I wait for an answer? Does this message 
need immediate recognition? If not, how long can it wait without 
causing a problem? 

Once you ask these questions, your best mode of communication 
is usually pretty obvious, except for one problem: How 
reliable is the mode? For example, How long will your e-mail sit 
there? Will it actually get read, or will it go directly to the 
inbound-only filing cabinet? 

In return for some uninterrupted brain time, people have to 
be interruptible for at least part of each day, and everybody has to 
agree that e-mail will be checked with reasonable frequency— 
say, three times per day or so. 

Don't Try This Yourself... 

/ have been working with a manager in Los Angeles for 
the last few years. He manages a system test group, 
which at times runs two or three shifts. E-mail is the 
way his team communicates, since at any given 
moment about one third of the team's members may be 
asleep. He told me about his morning mail drill: As 
soon as he's awake, he fires up his laptop to download 
all his e-mail while he showers. While he has his juice 


74 PEOPLEWARE 

and cereal, he reads his new mail and decides which 
pieces need immediate response. On his way to 
work—a typical LA. resident, he has about a fifty-mile 
commute—he answers his critical pieces. When he 
gets to the office, he docks his laptop and sends his 
responses. The trick is, he drives in by himself every 
morning. 

—TRL 

More important than any gimmick you introduce is a change 
in attitude. People must learn that it's okay sometimes not to 
answer their phones, and they must learn that their time—not just 
the quantity but its quality—is important. 


Chapter 12
BRING BACK THE DOOR


There are some prevalent symbols of success and failure in 
creating a sensible workplace. The most obvious symbol of success 
is the door. When there are sufficient doors, workers can control 
noise and mterruptability to suit their changing needs. The most 
obvious symbol of failure is the paging system. Organizations that 
regularly interrupt everyone to locate one person are showing themselves 
to be totally insensitive to the imperatives of a work-conducive 
environment. 

Manipulate these symbols and you not only call attention to 
your concern for a workable environment, you also reap the immediate 
associated advantage: People can get on with the work. But it 
sounds like a tall order, to get rid of the paging system and bring 
back the door. Is it beyond our capacity to effect these changes? 

The Show Isn't Over Till the Fat Lady Sings 

The degradation of working conditions that has affected most of us 
over the past ten years has depended on the consent of the victim. 
That doesn't mean that one such victim could have halted the trend 
by saying, "No, I won't work in noisy, cramped, exposed space." 
But it does mean that we as a group haven't hollered loud enough 
and often enough about the counterproductive side effects of saving 
money on space. 

While most of us believed that the trend toward noisier, tighter 
space was hurting productivity, we kept silent, because we lacked 


76 PEOPLEWARE 

the definitive statistical evidence that proved our case. The Furniture 
Police, of course, didn't provide any proof at all to support their 
contention that people would be just as productive working cheek-
by-jowl as they had been in a more sensible environment. They just 
asserted that it was true. 

We need to learn from them, learn to fight fire with fire. So, 
the first step toward a sane environment is a program of repeated 
assertion. If you believe that the environment is working against 
you, you've got to start saying so. You'll need to create a forum for 
other people to chime in too, perhaps with a survey of people's 
assessment of their working conditions. (In one such survey at a 
client company, workers cited seven negative aspects of their work, 
things they thought of as productivity-limiters. Of these, the first 
four were noise-related.) 

As people begin to realize that they aren't alone in their feelings, 
environmental awareness increases. And with this increased 
awareness, two good things begin to happen: First, the environment 
improves a bit as people try to be more thoughtful about noise 
and interruption; and second, the consent of the victim is withdrawn. 
It now becomes harder for upper management to take any 
other step to improve productivity without first paying some attention 
to the environment. 

Don't expect the Establishment to roll over and play dead just 
because you begin your campaign. There are (at least) three 
counter-arguments bound to surface almost immediately: 

. People don't care about glitzy office space. They're too 
intelligent for that. And the ones who do care are just 
playing status games. 
. Maybe noise is a problem, but there are cheaper ways to 
deal with it than mucking around with the physical layout. 
We could just pipe in white noise or Muzak and cover up 
the disturbance. 
. Enclosed offices don't make for a vital environment. We 
want people to interact productively, and that's what they 
want, too. So walls and doors would be a step in the 
wrong direction. 

BRING BACK THE'DOOR 77 

We deal with these objections in the next three subsections. 

The Issue of Glitz 

It's true that people don't care much about glitz. In one study after 
another, workers failed to give much weight to decor in choosing, 
for instance, among variously colored panels and fixtures. The 
feeling seemed to be that depressing surroundings would be counterproductive, 
but as long as the office wasn't depressing, then you 
could happily ignore it and get down to work. If all we're shooting 
for is an ignorable workplace, then money spent on high-fashion 
decor is a waste. 

The fact that workers don't care a lot about appearances is 
often misinterpreted to mean that they don't care a lot about any of 
the attributes of the workplace. If you ask them specifically about 
noise, privacy, and table space, though, you'll hear some strongly 
felt opinions that these characteristics matter a lot. This finding is 
consistent with the idea of an ignorable workplace as ideal; one can't 
ignore a workplace that is forever interrupting, paging, and generally 
harassing the worker. 

We find it particularly distressing to hear workers' concerns 
about their environment dismissed as status-seeking, because it's 
more often the case that higher management is guilty of status-seeking 
in designing the workers' space. The person who is working 
hard to deliver a high-quality product on time is not concerned with 
office appearances, but the boss sometimes is. So we see the paradoxical 
phenomenon that totally unworkable space is gussied up 
expensively and pointlessly with plush carpets, black and chrome 
furniture, corn plants that get more space than workers, and elaborate 
panels. The next time someone proudly shows you around a 
newly designed office, think hard about whether it's the functionality 
of the space that is being touted or its appearance. All too 
often, it's the appearance. 

Appearance is stressed far too much in workplace design. 
What is more relevant is whether the workplace lets you work or 
inhibits you. Work-conducive office space is not a status symbol, 
it's a necessity. Either you pay for it by shelling out what it costs, 
or you pay for it in lost productivity. 


78 PEOPLEWARE 

Creative Space 

In response to workers' gripes about noise, you can either treat the 
symptom or treat the cause. Treating the cause means choosing isolation 
in the form of noise barriers—walls and doors—and these 
cost money. Treating the symptom is much cheaper. When you 
install Muzak or some other form of pink noise, the disruptive noise 
is drowned out at small expense. You can save even more money 
by ignoring the problem altogether so that people have to resort to 
tape recorders and earphones to protect themselves from the noise. 
If you take either of these approaches, you should expect to incur an 
invisible penalty in one aspect of workers' performance: They will 
be less creative. 

During the 1960s, researchers at Cornell University conducted 
a series of tests on the effects of working with music. They polled a 
group of computer science students and divided the students into 
two groups, those who liked to have music in the background while 
they worked (studied) and those who did not. Then they put half of 
each group together in a silent room, and the other half of each 
group in a different room equipped with earphones and a musical 
selection. Participants in both rooms were given a Fortran programming 
problem to work out from specification. To no one's 
surprise, participants in the two rooms performed about the same in 
speed and accuracy of programming. As any kid who does his 
arithmetic homework with the music on knows, the part of the brain 
required for arithmetic and related logic is unbothered by 
music—there's another brain center that listens to the music. 

The Cornell experiment, however, contained a hidden wild 
card. The specification required that an output data stream be 
formed through a series of manipulations on numbers in the input 
data stream. For example, participants had to shift each number two 
digits to the left and then divide by one hundred and so on, perhaps 
completing a dozen operations in total. Although the specification 
never said it, the net effect of all the operations was that each output 
number was necessarily equal to its input number. Some people 
realized this and others did not. Of those who figured it out, the 
overwhelming majority came from the quiet room. 

Many of the everyday tasks performed by professional workers 
are done in the serial processing center of the left brain. Music 
will not interfere particularly with this work, since it's the brain's 
holistic right side that digests music. But not all of the work is cen



BRING BACK THE DOOR 79 

tered in the left brain. There is that occasional breakthrough that 
makes you say "Ahah!" and steers you toward an ingenious bypass 
that may save months or years of work. The creative leap involves 
right-brain function. If the right brain, is busy listening to 1001 
Strings on Muzak, the opportunity for a creative leap is lost. 

The creativity penalty exacted by the environment is insidious. 
Since creativity is a sometime thing anyway, we often don't notice 
when there is less of it. People don't have a quota for creative 
thoughts. The effect of reduced creativity is cumulative over a long 
period. The organization is less effective, people grind out the work 
without a spark of excitement, and the best people leave. 

Vital Space 

The case against enclosed offices sooner or later gets around to the 
"sterility" of working alone. But enclosed offices need not be one-
person offices. The two-or three- or four-person office makes a lot 
more sense, particularly if office groupings can be made to align 
with work groups. The worker who needs to spend fifty percent of 
his time with one other person will spend most of that time with a 
particular person. These two are natural candidates to share an 
office. 

Even in open-plan offices, co-workers should be encouraged 
to modify the grid to put their areas together into small suites. When 
this is allowed, people become positively ingenious in laying out the 
area to serve all their needs: work space, meeting space, and social 
space. Since they tend to be in interaction mode together or simultaneously 
in flow mode, they have less noise clash with each other 
than they would with randomly selected neighbors. The space has a 
vital quality because interaction is easy and natural. A degree of 
control over their space is viewed as an additional benefit. 

Breaking the Corporate Mold 

What could be less threatening than a proposal to allow people to 
reorganize open-plan seating into shared suites instead of individual 
cubicles? One of the great benefits of the kind of "office system" 
(that is, no offices) that your company may have purchased is its 
flexibility. At least that's what the EZ-Whammo Panel System 
brochure says. So it should be easy enough to move things around. 


80 PEOPLEWARE 

Letting people form suites may seem nonthreatening, but we predict 
that someone in the upper reaches of the organization will hate the 
idea. The problem is that the hallowed principle of uniformity is 
violated. By making everything uniform, the "owner" of a territory 
exercises and demonstrates control. Like the gardener who plants 
seeds exactly under a taut string so that the carrots will grow in a 
perfect row, this manager is threatened by the kind of disorder that 
nature (in this case, people's human nature) prefers. 

The inconvenient fact of life is that the best workplace is not 
going to be infinitely replicable. Vital work-conducive space for one 
person is not exactly the same as that for someone else. If you let 
them, your people will make their space into whatever they need it to 
be and the result is that it won't be uniform. Each person's space 
and each team's space will have a definite character of its own. If it 
didn't, they'd go back and alter it until it did. 

Management, at its best, should make sure there is enough 
space, enough quiet, and enough ways to ensure privacy so that 
people can create their own sensible workspace. Uniformity has no 
place in this view. You have to grin and bear it when people put up 
odd pictures or leave their desks a mess or move the furniture 
around ormerge theiroffices. When they've gotitjust thewaythey 
want it, they'll be able to put it out of their minds entirely and get on 
with the work. 


Chapter 13 

TAKING UMBRELLA STEPS


For this final chapter on the office environment, we look into 
characteristics of an ideal workplace, trying to shed some light on 
concerns such as these: 

. What kind of space would support your workers best to 
make them comfortable, happy, and productive? 
. What form of workspace would make these workers feelbest about themselves and about their work? 
If you work in a typical, noisy, and dreadfully uniform 
corporate space, such questions may seem almost cruel. But thinking 
about ideal space is worthwhile. Someday, you may be in a 
position to make it happen. Even today, you may be called upon to 
provide some input to the process of workspace improvement. It's 
sensible to indulge yourself a bit on the subject of space, just to 
know where you ought to be headed. Where you ought to be 
headed, in our opinion, is toward a workspace that has certain time-
proven characteristics. 

There is one timeless way of building. 

It is thousands of years old, and the same today as it has 
always been. 

81 


82 PEOPLEWARE 

The great traditional buildings of the past, the villages 
and tents and temples in which man feels at home, have 
always been made by people who were very close to the 
center of this way. It is not possible to make great 
buildings, or great towns, beautiful places, places 
where you feel yourself, places where you feel alive, 
except by following this way. And, as you will see, this 
way will lead anyone who looks for it to buildings 
which are themselves as ancient in their form, as the 
trees and hiHs, and as our faces are. 

—The Timeless Way of Building 

Christopher Alexander, architect and philosopher, is best 
known for his observations on the design process. He frames his 
concepts in an architectural idiom, but some of his ideas have had 
influence far beyond the field of architecture. (Alexander's book 
Notes on the Synthesis of Form, for example, is considered a kind 
of holy book by designers of all kinds.) Together with his 
colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure, Alexander set 
out to codify the elements of good architectural design. The resultant 
work is a three-volume set entitled The Timeless Way ofBuilding. 
The effect of this work is still being debated. Alexander 
believes that most modern architecture is bankrupt, and so most 
modern architects are understandably a bit defensive about the man 
and his ideas. But when you hold these books in your own hands 
and examine their premises against your own experience, it's hard 
not to take Alexander's side. His philosophy of interior space is a 
compelling one. It helps you to understand what it is that has made 
you love certain spaces and never feel comfortable in others. 

Alexander's Concept of Organic Order 

Imagine that your organization is about to build a complex of new 
space. What is the first step in this process? Almost certainly, it is 
development of a master plan. In most cases, this is a first and fatal 
deviation from the Timeless Way of Building. Vital, exciting, and 
harmonious spaces are never developed this way. The master plan 
envisions hugeness and grandeur, steel and concrete spans, modular 
approaches and replication to make an enormous whole of identical 
components. The result is sterile uniformity and space that doesn't 
work for anyone except the one Ego to whom it stands as a tribute. 


TAKING UMBRELLA STEPS 83 

Most monolithic corporate space can only be understood in 
terms of its symbolic value to the executives who caused it to be 
built This is their mark on the firmament, the lasting accomplishment 
they leave behind. They gloat, "Look on my works, ye 
Mighty, and despair!" Despair, of course, is exactly all you can do. 
Your cubicle, infinitely repeated to the horizon, leaves you feeling 
like a numbered cog. Whether it is TransAmerica's Orwellian tower 
in San Francisco or AT&T's Madison Avenue mausoleum, the 
result is depressingly the same: a sense of suffocation to the individual. 


The master plan is an attempt to impose totalitarian order. A 
single and therefore uniform vision governs the whole. In no two 
places is the same function achieved differently. A side effect of the 
totalitarian view is that the conceptualization of the facility is frozen 
in time. 

In place of the master plan, Alexander proposes a meta-plan. 
It is a philosophy by which a facility can grow in an evolutionary 
fashion to achieve the needs of its occupants. The meta-plan has 
three parts: 

. a philosophy of piecemeal growth 
. a set of patterns or shared design principles governing 
growth 
. local control of design by those who will occupy the space 
Under the meta-plan, facilities evolve through a series of small steps 
into campuses and communities of related buildings. By respecting 
the shared principles, they retain a harmony of vision, but not a 
sameness. Like mature villages, they begin to take on an evolved 
charm. This is what Alexander calls organic order, as described 
below and as shown in Figure 13.1. 

This natural or organic order emerges when there is 
perfect balance between the needs of the individual 
parts of the environment, and the needs of the whole. 
In an organic environment, every place is unique and 
the different places also cooperate, with no parts left 
over, to create a global whole—a whole which can be 
identified by everyone who is a part of it. 




The University of Cambridge is a perfect example of 
organic order. One of the most beautiful features of 
this university is the way the colleges—St. Johns, 
Trinity, Trinity Hall, Clare, Kings, Peterhouse, 
Queens—lie between the main street of the town and the 
river. Each college is a system of residential courts, 
each college has its entrance on the street, and opens 
onto the river; each college has its own small bridge 
that crosses the river, and leads to the meadows 
beyond; each college has its own boathouse and its own 
walks along the river. But while each college repeats 
the same system, each one has its own unique 
character. The individual courts, entrances, bridges, 
boathouses and walks are all different. 

—-The Oregon Experiment 


Figure 13.1. Swiss town,
without a 
an 
maexample of organic order 
ster plan. 
Patterns 

Each of the patterns of the Timeless Way of Building is an abstraction 
about successful space and interior order. The central volume 
of the set, A Pattern Language, presents 253 of these patterns and 
weaves them into a coherent view of architecture. Some of the pat



TAKING UMBRELLA STEPS 85 

terns have to do with light and roominess, others with decor, or 
with the relationship between interior and exterior space, or with 
space for adults, for children, for elders, or with traffic movement 
around and through enclosed space. Each pattern is presented as a 
simple architectural aphorism, together with a picture that illustrates 
it and a lesson. In between, there is a discussion of the whys and 
wherefores of the pattern. As an example, consider the following 
illustration and extract from Pattern 183, Workspace Enclosure: 


Figure 13.2. Workspace enclosurt. 

People cannot work effectively if their workspace is 
too enclosed or too exposed. A good workspace strikes 
the balance. . . . You feel more comfortable in a 
workspace if there is a wall behind you. . . . There 
should be no blank wall closer than eight feet in front 
of you. (As you work, you want to occasionally look up 
and rest your eyes by focusing them on something 
farther away than the desk. If there is a blank wall 
closer than eight feet your eyes will not change focus 
and they get no relief. In this case you feel too 
enclosed.) . . . You should not be able to hear noises 


86 PEOPLEWARE 

very different from the kind you make, from your 
workplace. Your workplace should be sufficiently 
enclosed to cut out noises which are a different kind 
from the ones you .make. There is some evidence that 
one can concentrate on a task better if people around 
him are doing the same thing, not something else. ... 
Workspaces should allow you to face in different 
directions. 

—A Pattern Language 

To complement the 253 basic patterns, teams need to prepare a 
set of new patterns tailored to the specific nature of their project. 
For the purposes of the next four subsections, we have nominated 
ourselves to be one such team. Our charter is to design sensible 
workspace for people who make their living by thinking. The four 
patterns we propose take aim at four of the worst failings of present-
day institutional space. In forming these patterns, we borrow heavily 
from those of our clients that have succeeded in creating 
successful workplaces. 

The First Pattern: Tailored Workspace from a Kit 

Today's modular cubicle is a masterpiece of compromise: It gives 
you no meaningful privacy and yet still manages to make you feel 
isolated. You are poorly protected from noise and disruption; 
indeed in some cases, sources ofnoise and disruption are actively 
piped into your space. You're isolated because that small lonely 
space excludes everyone but you (it's kind of a toilet stall without a 
toilet). The space makes it difficult to work alone and almost impossible 
to participate in the social unit that might form around your 
work. 

Individual modules give poor-quality space to the person 
working alone and no space at all to the team. The alternative to this 
is to fashion space explicitly around the working groups. Each team 
needs identifiable public and semiprivate space. Each individual 
needs protected private space. 

Groups of people who have been assigned or have elected to 
work together need to have a meaningful role in the design of their 
own space. Ideally, they are aided in this by a central space-planning 
organization, whose job is to find a chunk of space for the 
group: "I see there are three of you, so you'll be needing three-
hundred square feet or more. Yes, here's a nice possibility. Now 


TAKING UMBRELLA STEPS 87 

let's think about layout and furniture....." The team members and 
their space counselor next begin to work out the possible ways their 

space could be arranged: ' 
Figure 13.3. Possible space arrangements. 

Because of the requirement that workers be allowed to participate 
in the design of their own space, whatever system of desks and 
fixtures the company uses has to perform in a truly modular fashion. 
Instead of fitting only into a simple grid, the furnishings must be 
useful in myriad different configurations. 

The Second Pattern; Windows 

Modern office politics makes a great class distinction in the matter of 
allocating windows. Most participants emerge as losers in the window 
sweepstakes. People who wouldn't think of living in a home 
without windows end up spending most of their daylight time in 
windowless workspace. Alexander has very little patience with 
windowless space: "Rooms without a view are like prisons for the 
people who have to stay in them." 

We are trained to accept windowless office space as inevitable. 
The company would love for every one of us to have a window, we 


88 PEOPLEWARE 

hear, but that just isn't realistic. Sure it is. There is a perfect proof 
that sufficient windows can be built into a space without excessive 
cost. The existence proof is the hotel, any hotel. You can't even 
imagine being shown a hotel room with no window. You wouldn't 
stand for it. (And this is for a space you're only going to sleep in.) 
So hotels are constructed with lots of windows. 

The problem of windowless space is a direct result of a square 
aspect ratio. If buildings are constructed in a fairly narrow shape, 
there need be no shortage of windows. A sensible limit for building 
width is thirty feet, such as the building shown in Figure 13.4. 


Figure 13.4. Women's dormitory at Swarthmore College. 

Limit buildings to thirty feet in width? Can this be a serious 
proposal? What about costs? What about the economies of scale 
that come with building enormous indoor spaces? Some years ago, 
the Danish legislature passed a law that every worker must have his 
or her own window. This law has forced builders to construct long, 
narrow buildings, planned along the lines of hotels and apartment 
buildings. In studies conducted after the law had been in effect for a 
while, there was no very noticeable change in cost of space per 
square meter. That doesn't mean the narrow configuration had no 
cost significance, only that the increase, if any, was too small to 
show up in the data. Even if there is a higher cost per worker to 
house people in the more agreeable space, the added expense is 
likely to make good sense because of the savings it provides in other 
areas. The real problem is that the cost is in a highly visible 
category (space and services), while the offsetting advantage is in 
poorly measured and therefore invisible categories (increased 
productivity and reduced turnover). 


TAKING UMBRELLA STEPS 89 

The Third Pattern: Indoor and Outdoor Space 

The narrow configuration also makes it possible to achieve greater 
integration between indoor and outdoor space. If you've ever had 
the opportunity to work in space that had an outdoor component, it's 
hard to imagine ever again limiting yourself to working entirely 
indoors. 

Upon formation of the Atlantic Systems Guild in 1983, we set 
out to find Manhattan space to serve as a guild hall and office for 
New York-based members. The space we found and still occupy is 
the top floor of a Greenwich Village ship chandlery. It consists of 
two-thousand square feet indoors and a thousand-square-foot outdoor 
terrace. The terrace has become our spring, summer, and fall 
conference room and eating area. For at least half the year, the outdoor 
space is in use virtually full-time. Whatever work can be done 
outdoors is done outdoors. 

Before you dismiss our solution as an impossible luxury, 
think about this fact: We pay less than a third as much per square 
foot as the Manhattan average. Our space costs a lot less because 
it's not part of a monolith. You can't accommodate thousands of 
people centrally in such space. You'd have to hunt out hundreds of 
special situations in order to get a large staff into anything like the 
situation we've come up with. And when you did that, they would 
not all have identical facilities. On a given sunny day, some of your 
people would be working on terraces while others were in gardens 
or arbors or courtyards. How impractical. 

The Fourth Pattern: Public Space 

An age-old pattern of interior space is one that has a smooth 
"intimacy gradient" as you move toward the interior. At the extremity 
is space where outsiders (messengers and tradesmen and salesmen) 
may penetrate. Then you move into space that is reserved for 
insiders (the work group or the family), and finally to space that is 
only for the individual. This pattern applies to your home as you 
move from foyer to living room to kitchen to bedroom to bathroom. 
And it should be true as well of a healthy workplace. 

At the entrance to the workplace should be some area that 
belongs to the whole group. It constitutes a kind of hearth for the 
group. Further along the intimacy gradient should be space for the 
tightly knit work groups to interact and to socialize. Finally, there is 
the protected quiet thinking space for one person to work alone. 


90 PEOPLEWARE 

Group interaction space needs tables and seating for the whole 
group, writing surfaces, and areas to post whatever group members 
want to post. Ideally, there should also be a space for members to 
prepare simple meals and eat together: 

Without communal eating, no human group can hold 
together. Give each [working group] a place where 
people can eat together. Make the common meal a regular


 
In particular, start a common lunch in 
every workplace so that a genuine meal around a common 
table (not out of boxes, machines or bags) becomes 
an important, comfortable and daily event. . . . In our 
own work group at the Center, we found this worked 
most beautifully when we took it in turns to cook the 
lunch. The lunch became an event: a gathering: something 
that each of us put our love and energy into. 

—A Pattern Language 

.. 
The Pattern of the Patterns 

The patterns that crop up again and again in successful space are 
there because they are in fundamental accord with characteristics of 
the human creature. They allow him to function as a human. They 
emphasize his essence—he is at once an individual and a member of 
a group. They deny neither his individuality nor his inclination to 
bond into teams. They let him be what he is. 

A common element that runs through all the patterns (both 
ours and Alexander's) is reliance upon non-replicable formulas. No 
two people have to have exactly the same workspace. No two coffee 
areas have to be identical, nor any two libraries or sitting areas. 
The texture and shape and organization of space are fascinating 
issues to the people who occupy that space. The space needs to be 
isomorphic to the work that goes on there. And people at all levels 
need to leave their mark on the workplace. 

Return to Reality 

Now, what does all this have to do with you? If you work for a 
large institution, you're not likely to convince the powers that be to 
admit the error of their ways and allow everyone to build a Timeless 


TAKING UMBRELLA STEPS 91 

Way sort of workplace. And perhaps you don't want to work for a 
small company in which charming and idiosyncratic workplaces 
occur rather naturally. 

There is nonetheless a possible way to put your people into 
vital, productive space. The possibility arises because master-
planned space is almost always full, and it's a continual hassle to 
find a place to house any new effort. If you run one of those as-yet 
unhoused efforts, turn your sights outward. Petition to move your 
group out of the corporate monolith. You may be turned down, but 
then again, since there's no space for you in-house, you may not. 
Put your people to work to find and arrange their own space. Never 
mind that it may not have the same white plastic wastebaskets or 
corduroy-covered partitions as the headquarters' space. If you can 
pick up a lease on a run-down fraternity house or garden apartment 
that would make cheap, idiosyncratic, fascinating quarters for your 
people, well then, so what that they will be housed differently from 
everyone else in the company? If it's okay with them, who cares? 

You don't have to solve the space problem for the whole 
institution. If you can solve it just for your own people, you're way 
ahead. And if your group is more productive and has lower 
turnover, that just proves you're a better manager. 

It almost always makes sense to move a project or work group 
out of corporate space. Work conducted in ad hoc space has got 
more energy and a higher success rate. People suffer less from 
noise and interruption and frustration. The quirky nature of their 
space helps them form a group identity. If you are part of the lofty 
reaches of upper management, then decide which projects matter 
most. Move the key ones out. It's a sad comment that an important 
piece of work is likely to fare better off-site. It's sad but true. Make 
it work for you. 


PART III


THE RIGHT PEOPLE


The final outcome of any effort is more a function of who 
does the work than of how the work is done. Yet modem management 
science pays almost no attention to hiring and keeping the right 
people. Any management course you*re likely to take barely gives 
lip service to these aspects. 

Management science is much more concerned with the boss's 
role as principal strategist and tactician of the work. You are taught 
to think of management as playing out one of those battle simulation 
board games. There are no personalities or individual talents to be 
reckoned with in such a game; you succeed or fail based on your 
decisions of when and where to deploy your faceless resources. 

In the next four chapters, we will attempt to undo the damage 
of the manager-as-strategist view, and replace it with an approach 
that encourages you to court success with this formula: 

. get the right people 
. make them happy so they don't want to leave 
. turn them loose 
Of course, you have to coordinate the efforts of even the best 
team so that all the individual contributions add up to an integrated 
whole. But that's the relatively mechanical part of management. 
For most efforts, success or failure is in the cards from the moment 
the team is formed and the initial directions set out. With talented 
people, the manager can almost coast from that point on. 

93 


Chapter 14
THE HORNBLOWER FACTOR


C.S. Forester's series of novels on the Napoleonic Wars 
follows the exploits of Horatio Hornblower, an officer in England's 
Royal Navy. On one level, these are pure adventure stories set in a 
well-researched historical framework. On another level, the Horn-
blower books can be read as an elaborate management analogy. The 
job of running a square-rigged frigate or ship of the line is not so 
different from that of managing a company division or project The 
tasks of staffing, training, work allocation, scheduling, and tactical 
support will be familiar to anyone involved in management today, 
Hornblower is the ultimate manager. His career advanced 
from midshipman to admiral through the same blend of cleverness, 
daring, political maneuvering, and good luck that has promoted any 
of the corporate high-fliers featured in the pages of Business Week. 
There is a real-world management lesson to be learned from his 
every decision. 

Born Versus Made 

A recurrent theme through all the novels is Hornblower*s gloomy 
presentiment that achievers are born, not made. Many of the subordinates 
that fall to him through luck of the draw are undependable or 
stupid. He knows that they all will let him down at some key moment. 
(They always do.) He also knows that the few good men 
who come his way are his only real resource. Sizing them up 

95



96 PEOPLEWARE 

quickly and knowing when to depend on them are Hornblower's 
great talents. 

In our egalitarian times, it's almost unthinkable to write someone 
off as intrinsically incompetent. There is supposed to be inherent 
worth in every human being. Managers are supposed to use 
their leadership skills to bring out untapped qualities in each subordinate. 
This shaping of raw human material is considered the 
essence of management. 

That view may be more comforting than Hornblower's glum 
assessment, and it certainly is more flattering to managers, but it 
doesn't seem very realistic to us. Parents do have a shaping effect 
on their children over the years, and individuals can obviously bring 
about huge changes in themselves. But managers are unlikely to 
change their people in any meaningful way. People usually don't 
stay put long enough, and the manager just doesn't have enough 
leverage to make a difference in their nature. So the people who 
work for you through whatever period will be more or less the same 
at the end as they were at the beginning. If they're not right for the 
job from the start, they never will be. 

All of this means that getting the right people in the first place 
is all-important. Fortunately, you don't have to depend entirely on 
the luck of the draw. You may get to play a significant part in the 
hiring of new people or the selection of new team members from 
within the company. If so, your skill at these tasks will determine to 
a large extent your eventual success. 

The Uniform Plastic Person 

Even novice managers, setting out to hire staff for the first time, 
know something about the principles of good hiring. They know, 
for instance, that you can't hire based on appearance. The best-
looking candidate is not one whit more likely to deliver a good 
product than a candidate who is homely. 

Everybody knows that, but oddly enough most hiring mistakes 
result from too much attention to appearances and not enough 
to capabilities. This is not just due to ignorance or shallowness on 
the part of the person doing the hiring. Evolution has planted in 
each of us a certain uneasiness toward people who differ by very 
much from the norm. It is clear how this tendency serves evolution's 
purposes. You can observe this evolutionary defense in 
yourself in your reactions to a horror film, for instance. The almost 


THE HORNBLOWER FACTOR 97 

human "creature" is much more upsetting than the mile-wide eyeless 
blob that slowly digests Detroit. 

As each individual matures, he or she learns to override the 
built-in bias toward the norm in selecting friends and developing 
close relationships. Though you may have learned that lesson long 
ago in your personal life, you have to learn it all over again as you 
develop your hiring skills. 

You probably don't feel that you have an uncontrollable tendency 
to hire attractive or "normal" looking people. So why are we 
talking about this at all? Because it's not just your individual tendency 
toward the norm that affects your hiring, it's also your organization's 
subliminal imposition of a norm of its own. Each person 
you hire becomes part of your little empire and also part of your 
boss's empire and that of the next boss up the line. The standard 
you apply is not just your own. You're hiring on behalf of the 
whole corporate ladder above you. The perceived norm of these 
upper managers is working on you each time you consider making a 
new offer. That almost unsensed pressure is pushing toward the 
company average, encouraging you to hire people that look like, 
sound like, and think like everybody else. In a healthy corporate 
culture, this effect can be small enough to ignore. But when the 
culture is unhealthy, it's difficult or impossible to hire the one person 
who matters most, the one who doesn't think like all the rest. 

The need for uniformity is a sign of insecurity on the part of 
management. Strong managers don't care when team members cut 
then* hair or whether they wear ties. Their pride is tied only to their 
staff's accomplishments. 

Standard Dress 

Uniformity is so important to insecure authoritarian regimes 
(parochial schools and armies, for example) that they even impose 
dress codes. Different lengths of skirt or colors ofjacket are threatening, 
and so they are forbidden. Nothing is allowed to mar the 
long rows of nearly identical troops. Accomplishment matters only 
to the extent it can be achieved by people who don't look different. 

Companies, too, sometimes impose standards of dress. These 
are not so extreme as to oblige strictly uniform attire, but they 
remove considerable discretion from the individual. When this first 
happens, the effect is devastating. People can talk and think of 
nothing else. All useful work stops dead. The most valuable people 
begin to realize that they aren't appreciated for their real worth, that 


98 PEOPLEWARE 

their contributions to the work are not as important as their haircuts 
and neckties. Eventually they leave. And the rest of the company 
plods on, trying to prove that having the right people wasn't so 
important after all. 

Throughout these pages, we've suggested remedies for some 
of the things that can go wrong in organizations. But if what's gone 
wrong in yours is promulgation of a formal standard of appearance, 
forget it. It's too late for a remedy. The organization is suffering 
from the last stages of brain death. The corpse won't topple over 
immediately, since there are so many hands trying to prop it up. But 
propping up corpses is unsatisfying work. Get yourself a new job. 

Code Word: Professional 

When I alluded to management insecurity as the cause 
of arbitrary standardization, participants at one inhouse 
seminar could barely restrain themselves. They 
all had stories to tell. One of the silliest had to do with 
the company's reaction to use of the coffee area 
microwave to pop some popcorn during afternoon 
break. Of course, popping corn leaves an unmistakable 
smell. Someone from the ran fled altitudes of upper 
management smelted the smell and reacted. He declared 
in a memo, "Popcorn is not professional," and so would 
henceforth be forbidden. 

—TRL 

An anti-popcorn standard or even a dress standard might be 
understandable if you worked in the Customer Relations Department 
or in Sales. But in any other area, it makes no sense at all. There is 
seldom if ever a client wandering through such space. These 
"standards" have nothing to do with the organization's image as 
perceived by outsiders. It's the image perceived by insiders that 
matters. The insiders in question—typically second- and third-level 
managers with shaky self-confidence—are uncomfortable with any 
kind of behavior that is different from average. They need to impose 
safely homogenized mores on those beneath them to demonstrate 
that they are in charge. 

The term unprofessional is often used to characterize surprising 
and threatening behavior. Anything that upsets the weak manager 
is almost by definition unprofessional. So popcorn is unpro



THE HORNBLOWER FACTOR 99 

fessional. Long hair is unprofessional if it grows out of a male 
head, but perfectly okay if it grows out of a female head. Posters of 
any kind are unprofessional. Comfortable shoes are unprofessional. 
Dancing around your desk when something good happens is unprofessional. 
Giggling and laughing is unprofessional. (It's all right to 
smile, but not too often.) 

Conversely, professional means unsurprising. You will be 
considered professional to the extent you look, act, and think like 
everyone else, a perfect drone. 

Of course, this perverted sense of professionalism is pathological. 
In a healthier organizational culture, people are thought 
professional to the extent they are knowledgeable and competent. 

Corporate Entropy 

Entropy is levemess or sameness. The more it increases, the less 
potential there is to generate energy or do work. In the corporation 
or other organization, entropy can be thought of as uniformity of 
attitude, appearance, and thought process. Just as thermodynamic 
entropy is always increasing in the universe, so too corporate 
entropy is on the rise: 

SECOND THERMODYNAMIC LAW OF MANAGEMENT:
Entropy is always increasing in the organization.


That's why most elderly institutions are tighter and a lot less fun 
than sprightly young companies. 

There is not much you can do about this as a global phenomenon, 
but you've got to fight it within your own domain. The 
most successful manager is the one who shakes up the local entropy 
to bring in the right people and let them be themselves, even though 
they may deviate from the corporate norm. Your organization may 
have rigor mortis, but your little piece of it can hop and skip. 


Chapter 15
HIRING A JUGGLER


Circus Manager: How long have you been juggling? 
Candidate: Oh, about six years. 
Manager: Can you handle three balls, four balls, and five balls? 
Candidate: Yes, yes, and yes. 
Manager: Do you work with flaming objects? 
Candidate: Sure. 
Manager: .. . knives, axes, open cigar boxes, floppy hats? 
Candidate: I can juggle anything. 
Manager: Do you have a line of funny patter that goes with 
your juggling? 
Candidate: It's hilarious. 
Manager: Well, that sounds fine. I guess you're hired. 
Candidate: Umm ... Don't you want to see me juggle? 
Manager: Gee, I never thought of that. 

It would be ludicrous to think of hiring a juggler without first 
seeing him perform. That's just common sense. Yet when you set 
out to hire an engineer or a designer or a programmer or a group 
manager, the rules of common sense are often suspended. You 
don't ask to see a design or a program or anything. In fact, the 
interview isjust talk. 

100 


HIRING A JUGGLER 101 

You're hiring a person to produce a product, presumably similar 
to those he or she has made before. You need to examine a 
sample of those products to see the quality of work the candidate 
does. That may seem obvious, but it's almost always overlooked 
by development managers. There is a surface reserve at work when 
you meet for a job interview. There seems to be an unwritten rale 
that says it's okay to ask the candidate about past work but not to 
ask to see it. Yet when you ask, candidates are almost always 
pleased to bring along a sample. 

The Portfolio 

In the spring of 1979, while teaching together in western Canada, 
we got a call from a computer science professor at the local technical 
college. He proposed to stop by our hotel after class one evening 
and buy us beers in exchange for ideas. That's the kind of offer we 
seldom turn down. What we learned from him that evening was 
almost certainly worth more than whatever he learned from us. 

The teacher was candid about what he needed to be judged a 
success in his work: He needed his students to get good job offers 
and lots of them. "A Harvard diploma is worth something in and of 
itself, but our diploma isn't worth squat. If this year's graduates 
don't get hired fast, there are no students next year and I'm out of a 
job." So he had developed a formula to make his graduates optimally 
attractive to the job market. Of course he taught them modern 
techniques for system construction, including structured analysis 
and design, data-driven design, information hiding, structured coding, 
walkthroughs, and metrics. He also had them work on real 
applications for nearby companies and agencies. But the centerpiece 
of his formula was the portfolio that all students put together to 
show samples of their work. 

He described how his students had been coached to show off 
their portfolios as part of each interview: 

"I've brought along some samples of the kind of work I 
do. Here, for instance, is a subroutine in Pascal from 
one project and a set of COBOL paragraphs from another. 
As you can see in this portion, we use the loop-with-exit 
extension advocated by Knuth, but aside from that, it's 
pure structured code, pretty much the sort of thing that 
your company standard calls for. And here is the design 
that this code was written from. The hierarchies and 


102 PEOPLEWARE 

coupling analysis use Myers' notation. I designed all of 
this particular subsystem, and this one little section 
where we used some Orr methods because the data 
structure really imposed itself on the process structure. 
And these are the leveled data flow diagrams that make 
up the guts of our specification, and the associated data 
dictionary. ..." 

In the years since, we've often heard more about that obscure 
technical college and those portfolios. We've met recruiters from as 
far away as Triangle Park, North Carolina, and Tampa, Florida, 
who regularly converge upon that distant Canadian campus for a 
shot at its graduates. 

Of course, this was a clever scheme of the professor's to give 
added allure to his graduates, but what struck us most that evening 
was the report that interviewers were always surprised by the portfolios. 
That meant they weren't regularly requiring all candidates to 
arrive with portfolios. Yet why not? What could be more sensible 
than asking each candidate to bring along some samples of work to 
the interview? 

Aptitude Tests 

If it's so important that the new hire be good at the various skillsused in the job, why not design an aptitude test to measure those 
skills? Our industry has had a long, irregular flirtation with the idea 
of aptitude testing. In the sixties, the idea was positively in vogue. 
By now, you and your organization have probably given up on the 
concept. In case you haven't, we offer one good reason that you 
ought to: The tests measure the wrong thing. 

Aptitude tests are almost always oriented toward the tasks the 
person will perform immediately after being hired. They test 
whether he or she is likely to be good at statistical analysis or programming 
or whatever it is that's required in the position. You can 
buy aptitude tests in virtually any technical area, and they all tend to 
have fairly respectable track records at predicting how well the new 
hire will perform. But so what? A successful new hire might do 
those tasks for a few years and then move on to be team leader or a 
product manager or a project head. That person might end up doing 
the tasks that the test measured for two years and then do other 
things for twenty. 


HIRING A JUGGLER 103 

The aptitude tests we've seen are mostly left-brain oriented. 
That's because the typical things new hires do are performed largely 
in the left brain. The things they do later on in their career, however, 
are to a much greater degree right-brain activities. Management, 
in particular, requires holistic thinking, heuristic judgment, 
and intuition based upon experience. So the aptitude test may give 
you people who perform better in the short term, but are less likely 
to succeed later on. Maybe you should use an aptitude test but hire 
only those who fail it. 

From your reading of this book, you'd hardly expect its 
authors to endorse the idea of hiring through the use of aptitude 
tests. But it doesn't follow that aptitude tests are no good or that 
you ought not to be using them. You should use them, just not for 
hiring. The typical aptitude test you buy or build can be a wonderful 
self-assessment vehicle for your people. Frequent interesting 
opportunities for private self-assessment are a must for workers in a 
healthy organization. (More about this in Chapter 24.) 

Holding an Audition 

The business we're in is more sociological than technological, more 
dependent on workers' abilities to communicate with each other than 
their abilities to communicate with machines. So the hiring process 
needs to focus on at least some sociological and human communication 
traits. The best way we've discovered to do this is through 
the use of auditions for job candidates. 

The idea is simple enough. You ask a candidate to prepare a 
ten- or fifteen-minute presentation on some aspect of past work. It 
could be about a new technology and the experience with first trying 
it out, or about a management lesson learned the hard way, or about 
a particularly interesting project. The candidate chooses die subject. 
The date is set and you assemble a small audience made up of those 
who will be the new hire's co-workers. 

Of course the candidate will be nervous, perhaps even reluctant 
to undertake such an experience. You'll have to explain that all 
candidates are nervous about the audition and give your reasons for 
holding one: to see the various candidates' communication skills, 
and to give the future co-workers a part in the hiring process. 

At the end of the audition and after the candidate has left, you 
hold a debriefing of those present. Each one gets to comment on the 
person's suitability for the job and whether he or she seems likely to 
fit well into the team. Although it's ultimately your responsibility to 


104 PEOPLEWARE 

decide whether to hire or not, the feedback from future co-workers 
can be invaluable. Even more important, any new person hired is 
more likely to be accepted smoothly into the group, since the other 
group members have had a voice in choosing the candidate. 

My first experience with auditions was in hiring people 
to be consultants and instructors. My motivation 
in torturing these prospective hires was simple 
enough; I wanted to get a sense of whether they were 
natural explainers of matters simple or complex, or 
people who could be taught to explain such matters, or 
those who could never explain anything to anyone. I 
also wanted some second opinions on the matter, so I 
had those of my people who were in the office at the 
time of the audition sit in on the presentation. Over 
five years, we conducted nearly two hundred auditions. 

It soon became clear that the audition process served to 
accelerate the socialization process between a new hire 
and the existing staff members. A successful audition 
was a kind of certification as a peer. The reverse 
seemed to hold true as well. Failed auditions were a 
morale booster for the staff. They were continuing 
proof that being hired for the group was more than just 
the dumb luck of when resumes happened to hit my 
desk. 

—TRL 

One caveat about auditions: Make sure the candidate speaks 
about something immediately germane to the work your organization 
does. It's easy to be snookered by a talk on a topic from extreme 
left field, like "Caring for the Autistic Child" or "Effects of Acid 
Rain." You're liable to catch a glimpse of a very compelling passion 
on the speaker's part, a passion that you'll never see again on 
the job. 


Chapter 16 

HAPPY TO BE HERE


This chapter begins with a pop quiz: 

Ql. What annual employee turnover has your organization 
experienced over the last few years? 

Q2. How much does it cost on average to replace a person 
who leaves? 

Score yourself as follows: If you had any answer at all to the two 
questions, you pass. Otherwise you fail. Most people fail. 

In all fairness, perhaps it's not your job to know about such 
things. Okay, we'll re-score your quiz. You pass if anyone in your 
organization has a real answer to the two questions. Most people 
still fail. We avoid measuring turnover for the same reason that 
heavy smokers avoid having long serious talks with their doctors 
about longevity: It's a lot of bother that can only result in bad news. 

Turnover: The Obvious Costs 

Typical turnover figures we encounter are in the range of eighty 
percent to thirty-three percent per year, implying an average 
employee longevity of from fifteen to thirty-six months. Assume 
for the moment that the turnover for your company is in the middle 
of this range. The average person leaves after a little more than two 
years. It costs one-and-a-half to two months' salary to hire a new 
employee, either as a fee to an agency, or as the cost of an in-house 


106 PEOPLEWARE 

personnel service that does the same function. The employee, once 
hired, may go right to work on a project, in which case his or her 
hours are all billed to the project—there is no indication of startup 
cost. This is, however, a pure bookkeeping fiction. We all know 
that a new employee is quite useless on day one or even worse than 
useless, since someone else's time is required to begin bringing the 
new person up to speed. 

By the end of a few months, the new person is doing some 
useful work; within five months, he or she is at full working 
capacity. A reasonable assessment of startup cost is therefore 
approximately three lost work-months per new hire. (Obviously, 
the startup cost is worse or much worse to the extent that the work 
to be performed is highly esoteric.) The total cost of replacing each 
person is the equivalent of four-and-a-half to five months of 
employee cost or about twenty percent of the cost of keeping that 
employee for the full two years on the job. 

Turnover varies enormously from one organization to another. 
We hear of companies with a ten percent turnover, and others in the 
same business with a hundred percent or higher turnover. At any 
chance gathering of managers from rival companies, you can expect 
that the person seated next to you has got a turnover rate that is different 
from yours by more than a factor of two. Of course, neither 
of you knows which way this difference works, and you never will 
because at least one of the two of you probably works for a company 
that doesn't measure turnover. 

The Hidden Costs of Turnover 

Employee turnover costs about twenty percent of all manpower 
expense. But that's only the visible cost of turnover. There is an 
ugly invisible cost that can be far worse. 

In companies with high turnover, people tend toward a 
destructively short-term viewpoint, because they know they just 
aren't going to be there very long. So if you find yourself campaigning 
for better workspace for your staff, for example, don't be 
surprised to bump into someone up the hierarchy who counters with 
an argument like this: 

"Hold on there, Buster. You're talking about big bucks. 
If we gave our engineers that much space and noise protection 
and even privacy, we might end up spending fifty 
dollars per person per month! Multiply that times all the 


HAPPY TO BE HERE 107 

engineers and you're into the tens of thousands of dollars. 
We can't spend that kind of money. I'm as much 
in favor of productivity as the next guy, but have you 
seen what a terrible third quarter we're having?" 

Of course, the irrevocably logical answer to this is that investing 
now in a sensible environment will help to avoid terrible third quarters 
in the future. But save your breath. You have encountered a 
short-term perspective that no amount of irrevocable logic is going 
to sway. This person is on his or her way out of the company. The 
short-term cost is very real, but the long-term benefit has no meaning 
whatsoever. 

In an organization with high turnover, nobody is willing to 
take the long view. If the organization is a bank, it will lend money 
to the Ugandan Development Corporation because the twenty-two 
percent interest looks terrific on this quarter's books. Of course, the 
UDC will default in a couple of years, but who's even going to be 
here then? If the organization is a development shop, it will optimize 
for the short term, exploit people, cheat on the workplace, and 
do nothing to conserve its very lifeblood, the peopleware that is its 
only real asset. If we ran our agricultural economy on the same 
basis, we'd eat our seed corn immediately and all starve next year. 

If people only stick around a year or two, the only way to 
conserve the best people is to promote them quickly. That means 
near beginners being promoted into first-level management positions. 
They may have only five years of experience and perhaps 
less than two years with the company. 

There is something very disconcerting about these numbers. 
A person with a work life of, say, forty years will spend five years 
working and thirty-five managing. That implies an exceedingly tall, 
narrow hierarchy. Fifteen percent of the staff is doing work, with 
eighty-five percent managing. As little as ten percent of the cost 
could be spent on the workers, with ninety percent going to reward 
the managers. Even Marx didn't foresee such top-heaviness of capitalistic 
structures. 

Not only is the structure wastefully top-heavy, it tends to have 
very lightweight people at the bottom. This is somewhat true 
throughout the industry, but strikingly true in high-turnover companies. 
It's not unusual to see serious, mature companies turning 
out products that are developed by workers with an average age in 
their twenties, and average experience of less than two years. 




Many of us have come to believe that companies that promote 
early are where the action is. That's natural, because as young 
workers we're eager to get ahead. But from the corporate perspective, 
late promotion is a sign of health. In companies with low 
turnover, promotion into the first-level management position comes 
only after as much as ten years with the company. (This has long 
been true of some of the strongest organizations within IBM, for 
example.) The people at the lowest level have on the average at least 
five years'experience. The hierarchy is low and flat. 

Why People Leave 

For the individuals considering a change in job, the reasons can be 
as many and varied as the personalities involved. For the organization 
with pathologically high turnover (anything over fifty percent), 
a few reasons account for most departures: 

. a just-passing-through mentality: Co-workersengender no 
feelings of long-term involvement in the job. 

. a feeling of disposability: Management can only think of 
its workers as interchangeable parts (since turnover is so 
high, nobody is indispensable). 

* a sense that loyalty would be ludicrous: Who could be 
loyal to an organization that views its people as parts? 
The insidious effect here is that turnover engenders turnover. 
People leave quickly, so there's no use spending money on training. 
Since the company has invested nothing in the individual, the individual 
thinks nothing of moving on. New people are not hired for 
their extraordinary qualities, since replacing extraordinary qualities 
is too difficult. The feeling that the company sees nothing extraordinary 
in the worker makes the worker feel unappreciated as an individual. 
Other people are leaving all the time, so there's something 
wrong with you if you're still here next year. 

A Special Pathology: The Company Move 

There is no bigger ego trip for insecure managers than moving the 
company to some distant place. That is Wheeling and Dealing at its 
best! Injecting so much misery into workers' lives makes the man



HAPPY TO BE HERE 109 

agers feel positively god-like. The normal business of running the 
company lets them control their people's work lives, but the move 
lets them have a measure of control over even their personal lives. 

Of course, they are marvelously somber when explaining the 
rationale behind the move. They talk about the escalating price of 
space or the tax structure of the old location and the benefits of the 
new one. Whatever the reasons given for the move, you can be sure 
the real reasons are very different. The real reason for the move is a 
political deal, or a chance to build a new edifice (finally, a piece of 
physical evidence of their importance), or reduction of the boss'scommute by moving the company to the suburb where the boss 
happens to live. Sometimes it's simply the naked exercise of 
power. 

The more egocentric the manager, the more intense the fondness 
for the company move. Listen to Robert Townsend in Up the 
Organization on the subject: 

If you've inherited (or built) an office that needs a real 
house cleaning, the only sure cure is move the whole 
thing out of town, leaving the dead wood behind. One of 
my friends has done it four times with different companies. 
The results are always the same: 1) The good 
ones are confident of their futures and go with you. 2) 
The people with dubious futures (and their wives) 
don't have to face the fact that they've been fired. "The 
company left town," they say. They get job offers 
quickly, usually from your competitors who think 
they're conducting a raid. 3) The new people at Destiny 
City are better than the ones you left behind and 
they're infused with enthusiasm because they've been 
exposed only to your best people. 

— Up the Organization 
What this is, to use a technical term, is the purest crap. One 
thing Townsend seems to have missed entirely is the presence of 
women in the workforce. The typical person being moved today is 
part of a two-career family. The other half of that equation is 
probably not being moved, so the corporate move comes down hard 
on the couple's relationship at a very delicate point. It brings intolerable 
stress to bear on the accommodation they're both striving to 


110 PEOPLEWARE 

achieve to allow two full-fledged careers. That's hitting below 
the belt. Modern couples won't put up with it and they won't forgive 
it. The company move might have been possible in the 
1950s and 1960s. Today it is folly. 

Even in the sixties, organizational moves didn't make much 
sense. A case in point is the decision by AT&T's Bell Laboratories 
to move the six-hundred-person ESS1 project from New 
Jersey to Illinois in 1966. There were many reasons given for the 
move, but it now seems likely that there were some political 
shenanigans involved. In the 1950s, then Senators Kennedy and 
Johnson had arranged for huge new investments in Massachusetts 
and Texas, and Senator Dirksen of Illinois had something coming. 
What a coup for Dirksen if six-hundred high-salary, low-pollution 
jobs could be moved into his state. A little pressure on AT&T, 
perhaps, to trade off the move against concessions in some 
antitrust matter or regulatory relief. The rationale within the Labs 
was that the cost wouldn't be too excessive: a few thousand dollars 
per person in relocation expenses and maybe a bit of 
turnover. . . . 

Years after the ESS cutover, I arranged to interview 
Ray Ketchledge who had run the project. I was writing 
some essays on management of large efforts, and ESS 
certainly qualified. I asked him what he saw as his 
main successes and failures as boss. "Forget the successes," 
he said. "The failure was that move. You 
can't believe what it cost us in turnover." He went on 
to give some figures. The immediately calculable cost 
of the move was the number of people who quit before 
relocation day. Expressed as a percentage of those 
moved, this initial turnover was greater than the French 
losses in the trenches of World War I. 

—TDM 

You can do less damage to your organization by lining up 
the staff in front of a machine gun than you do by moving. And 
that accounts only for the initial loss. In the case of Bell Labs, 
there was another large exodus starting about a year after the 
move. These were the people who had honestly tried to go along 
with the company. They moved and when they didn't like the 
new location, they moved again. 


HAPPY TO BE HERE 111 

The Mentality of Permanence 

Over the years, we have been privileged to work and consult for a 
few companies with extraordinarily low turnover. You won't be 
surprised to learn that low turnover is not the only good thing about 
these companies. Indeed, they seem to excel at many or most of thepeople-conscious qualities discussed in these pages. They are the 
best. 

The best organizations are not of a kind; they are more notable 
for their dissimilarities than for their likenesses. But one thing that 
they all share is a preoccupation with being the best. It is a constant 
topic in the corridors, in working meetings, and in bull sessions. 
The converse of this effect is equally true: In organizations that are 
not "the best," the topic is rarely or never discussed. 

The best organizations are consciously striving to be best. 
This is a common goal that provides common direction, joint satisfaction, 
and a strong binding effect. There is a mentality of permanence 
about such places, the sense that you'd be dumb to look for a 
job elsewhere—people would look at you as though you were daft. 
This is the kind of community feeling that characterized jhe 
American small towns of the past. It is something too often missing 
from the cities and municipalities where we live, so it is all the 
more important in the workplace. Some ambitious companies set 
out explicitly to engender a sense of community. At Reader's Digest 
and certain Hewlett-Packard locations, for example, the company 
has set up community gardens for employees. At lunch hour, the 
fields are full of amateur hoers and weeders and people talking 
tomatoes over their fences. There are contests to grow the sweetest 
pea or the longest zucchini, and active bartering sessions where you 
can trade away some of your garlic for corn. 

You can prove that community gardens don't make any sense 
at all in the short term. Whatever costs there are will come right out 
of this quarter's bottom line. At most companies, that would be 
enough to quash the concept immediately. But in the best organizations, 
the short term is not the only thing that matters. What matters 
more is being best. And that's a long-term concept. 

People tend to stay at such companies because there is a 
widespread sense that you are expected to stay. The companyinvests hugely in your personal growth. There may be a Master's 
program or an extensive training period for new hires, as much as a 


112 PEOPLEWARE 

year in some places. It's hard to miss the message that you are 
expected to stay, when the company has just invested that much in 
your formation. 

A common feature of companies with the lowest turnover is 
widespread retraining. You're forever bumping into managers and 
officers who started out as secretaries, payroll clerks, or mail-boys. 
They came into the company green, often right out of school. When 
they needed new skills to make a change, the company provided 
those skills. No job is a dead end. 

Again, one can prove that retraining is not the cheapest way to 
fill a new slot. It's always cheaper in the short run to fire the person 
who needs retraining and hire someone else who already has the 
required skills. Most organizations do just that. The best organizations 
do not. They realize that retraining helps to build the mentality 
of permanence that results in low turnover and a strong sense 
of community. They realize that it more than justifies its cost. 

At Southern California Edison, the person in charge of all data 
processing began as a meter reader. At EG&G, there is a program 
of retraining secretaries to become systems analysts. At the Bureau 
of Labor Statistics, philosophy Ph.D.s are hired to become software 
developers and the retraining starts with their first day on the job. 
At Hitachi Software, the chief scientist has as his principal function 
the training of new hires. At Pacific Bell, a main source of new 
systems people is the retrained lineman or operator. These companies 
are different from the norm. They feel different. There is an 
energy and sense of belonging that is practically palpable. It makes 
you feel sorry for the companies that don't have it. 


Chapter 17 

THE SELF-HEALING SYSTEM


An employee storms into the Personnel Department and 
resigns. The next morning, he and Ms boss turn up to explain rather 
sheepishly that the whole thing was a silly mistake. Would it be 
possible to undo his resignation? The workers handling the case 
look at the partly completed transaction in some perplexity, 
Whoever had designed the procedures for dealing with termination 
had made no allowance for undoing. But it's easy enough to see 
what will make it all come out right: Let's see, we can just drop this 
whole file into the wastebasket and pretend it never existed, then we 
void out the final payroll check and ran over to Harryfs desk and 
grab the insurance cancellation forms before he sees them.,.. 

A system has just healed itself. Something had teen left out 
of its original design, something that turned out to be necessary. 
The people who make the system go have fixed it on the fly. It 
happens all the time. 

Deterministic and Non-Deterministic 

When you automate a previously all-human system, it becomes 
entirely deterministic. The new system is capable of making only 
those responses planned explicitly by its builders. So the self-healing 
quality is lost. Any response that will be required must be put 
there in the first place. If ever the system needs to be healed, that 
can only be done outside the context of its operation. Maintainers 
come in to take the system apart and reconstruct it with one or more 
new planned responses added. 

.. .! 



In one view, getting rid of the rather messy and uncontrollable 
self-healing capacity is a positive benefit of automation. The system 
is planned "right" in the first place, and then there is no need for tinkering 
during operation. But it's no secret that this can be expensive. 
Automators spend much of their time thinking through situations 
that are so unlikely or occur so rarely that the human elements 
of the old system never even bothered to consider them unless and 
until they actually happened. If the business policy governing the 
new system has a sufficient degree of natural ad hoc-racy, it's a 
mistake to automate it. Determinism will be no asset then; the system 
will be in constant need of maintenance. 

The reason that non-deterministic systems can often heal 
themselves painlessly and elegantly (sometimes at no cost at all) is 
that the humans who make up the system have an easy familiarity 
with the underlying goals. When a new situation crops up, they 
know immediately what action makes sense. Someday it may be 
possible to teach computers the goals of the system instead of the 
actions expected to achieve the goals, but right now that's beyond 
the horizon. The point here is that making a system deterministic 
will result in the loss of its ability to heal itself. 

The organization that you work in or manage is in some sense 
a system. It is an amalgam of interacting people and processes that 
exist to achieve some end. It's all the vogue these days to talk of 
making such systems more deterministic. That brings us to the subject 
of Methodology. 

The Covert Meaning of Methodology 

The maddening thing about most of our organizations is that they are 
only as good as the people who staff them. Wouldn't it be nice if 
we could get around that natural limit, and have good organizations 
even though they were staffed by mediocre or incompetent people? 
Nothing could be easier—all we need is (trumpet fanfare, please) a 
Methodology. 

A Methodology is a general systems theory of how a whole 
class of thought-intensive work ought to be conducted. It comes in 
the form of a fat book that specifies in detail exactly what steps to 
take at any time, regardless of who's doing the work, regardless of 
where or when. The people who write the Methodology are smart. 
The people who carry it out can be dumb. They never have to turn 


THE SELF-HEALING SYSTEM 115 

their brains to the ON position. All they do is start on page one and 
follow the Yellow Brick Road, like happy little Munchkins, all the 
way from the start of the job to its successful completion, The 
Methodology makes all the decisions, the people make none. The 
organization becomes entirely deterministic. 

Like any other system, a team of human workers will lose its 
self-healing properties to the extent it becomes deterministic. The 
result can be workers proceeding in directions that make no sense to 
them at all, a sure sign that they can't be doing any good. Some 
years ago, we conducted a post mortem of a failed project by asking 
each of the project workers to speak for an hour or so into a tape 
recorder. They did this in the privacy of their own homes and we 
assured them that only we two, the consultants, would ever hear the 
tapes. One of the speakers gave us this observation: 

"By March we had been doing this [applying one of the 
techniques dictated from on high] for nearly two months. 
I couldn't see how it was helping us in any way, but 
George kept assuring us that it was. He said we should 
trust in the Methodology, and it would all work out in 
the end." 

f 

Of course it didn't. The project workers are the ones most familiar 
with the territory of the project. If a given direction doesn't make 
sense to them, it doesri t make sense at all. 

There is a big difference between Methodology and methodology. 
Small m methodology is a basic approach one takes to getting 
a job done. It doesn't reside in a fat book, but rather inside the 
heads of the people carrying out the work. Such a methodology 
consists of two parts: a tailored plan (specific to the work at hand) 
and a body of skills necessary to effect the plan. One could hardly 
be opposed to methodology: The work couldn't even begin without 
it. But a Methodology is very different 

Big M Methodology is an attempt to centralize thinking. All 
meaningful decisions are made by the Methodology builders, not by 
the staff assigned to do the work. Those who espouse a Methodology 
have a long list of its supposed benefits, including standardization, 
documentary uniformity, managerial control, and state-of-theart 
techniques. These make up the overt case for the Methodology. 
The covert case is simpler and cruder: the idea that project people 
aren't smart enough to do the thinking. 


116 PEOPLEWARE 

MethodologyMadness 

Of course, if your people aren't smart enough to think their way 
through their work, the work will fail. No Methodology will help. 
Worse still, Methodologies can do grievous damage to efforts in 
which the people are fully competent. They do this by trying to 
force the work into a fixed mold that guarantees 

. a morass of paperwork, 
. a paucity of methods, 
. an absence of responsibility, and 
. a general loss of motivation. 
The following paragraphs comment on each of these effects. 

Paperwork: The Methodologies themselves are huge and getting 
huger (they have to grow to add the "features" required by each 
new kind of situation). It's not at all unusual for a Methodology to 
use up a linear foot or more of shelf space. Worse, they encourage 
people to build documents rather than do work. The documentary 
obsession of such Methodologies seems to have resulted from paranoid 
defensive thinking along these lines: "The last project generated 
a ton of paper and it was still a disaster, so this project will have 
to generate two tons." The technological sectors of our economy 
have now been through a decade-long flirtation with the idea that 
more and more and more paperwork will solve its problems. Perhaps 
it's time to introduce this contrary and heretical notion: 

Voluminous documentation Is part of the problem, 
not part of the solution. 

Methods: The centerpiece of most Methodologies is the concept 
of standardized methods. If there were a thousand different but 
equally good ways to go about the work, it might make some sense 
to choose one and standardize upon it. But in our state of technological 
infancy, there are very few competing methods for most of 
the work we do. When there are genuine alternatives, people have 
to know about and master them all. To standardize on one is to 
exclude the others. It boils down to the view that knowledge is so 
valuable, we must use it sparingly. 


THE SELF-HEALING 

Responsibility: If something goes wrong on a Methodology 
effort, the fault is with the Methodology, not the people. (The 
Methodology, after all, made all of the decisions.) Working in such 
an environment is virtually responsibility-free. People want to 
accept responsibility, but they won't unless given acceptable degrees 
of freedom to control their own success. 

Motivation: The message in the decision to impose a Methodology 
is apparent to all. Nothing could be more demotivating 
than the knowledge that management thinks its workers incompetent. 


The Issue of Malicious Compliance 

Those who build Methodologies are tortured by the thought that 
thinking people will simply ignore them. In many organizations, 
that is just what happens. Even more upsetting is the opposite 
possibility: that people won't ignore the Methodology, but will 
instead do exactly what it says to do, even when they know doing 
so will lead to wasted time, unworkable products, and meaningless 
documentation. This is what our cohort Ken Orr calls "malicious 
compliance." When the Methodology calls for an eighteen-pait 
operator's manual, developers may write one, even for a product so 
deeply imbedded in an engine or a satellite that no operator intervention 
is possible. When the Methodology says you have to fill out a 
database residency form for each data element, developers may do 
so, even though the system has no database. 

In Australia, where striking uses up nearly as much labor time 
as working, there is a charming form of strike called work to rule. 
Rather than walk off the job, workers open up a fat book of procedures 
and announce, "Until you give us what we're asking for, 
we're going to work exactly to the rule." When the air traffic controllers 
do this, for instance, they can only land one plane every 
seven minutes. If doctors were to do it, an appendectomy would 
take a week. Introduction of a Methodology opens up the possibility 
of work-to-rule actions in still more parts of the economy. 
People might actually do exactly what the Methodology says, and 
the work would grind nearly to a halt. 

The Baby and the Bathwater 

Most of the benefits claimed on behalf of Methodologies are really 
benefits of convergence of method. To the extent that different peo



118 PEOPLEWARE 

pie doing the same work converge on the same methods and use 
them the^ same way, there can be real advantages. Maintenance 
personnel will be able to relate more quickly to new products, 
developers will be able to move onto new projects and get up to 
speed more quickly, metrics will be consistently defined from one 
effort to another, and certain kinds of failures will be more readily 
detectable. Convergence of method is a good thing. But Methodologies 
are not the only way to achieve convergence. 

Methodologies seek to force convergence through statute. 
There is an inevitable backlash, the result partly of enforcers' 
heavy-handedness and partly of thinking workers' strong sense of 
independence, the cowboy mentality so common to those who 
populate any new frontier. Better ways to achieve convergence of 
method are 

Training: People do what they know how to do. If you 

give them all a common core of methods, they will tend 

to use those methods. 

Tools: A few automated aids for modeling, design, 

implementation, and test will get you more convergence 

of method than all the statutes you can pass. 

Peer Review: In organizations where there are active 
peer review mechanisms (quality circles, walkthroughs, 
inspections, technology fairs), there is a natural tendency 
toward convergence. 

It's only after this kind of gently guided convergence that you 
may think of publishing a standard. You can't really declare 
something a standard until it has already become a de facto standard. 
This is fundamental to the theory of standardization at 
DuPont, for instance. In that company's standards manual, it 
defines a standard as "a proven method for undertaking a repeated 
task." The manual goes on to explain that proven means "demonstrated 
widely and successfully within DuPont." That seems like 
common sense to us, but it goes against the industry-wide convention 
of hunting out new approaches and imposing them as standards 
before anyone in the organization has even tried them out. 


THE SELF-HEALING SYSTEM 119


The High-Tech Illusion Revisited 

The obsession with Methodologies in the workplace is another 
instance of the high-tech illusion. It stems from the belief that what 
really matters is the technology. Even the best imaginable Methodology, 
one that prescribes exactly the right method for every activity, 
may give only a small improvement in the technology. The people, 
after all, aren't going to make every decision wrong, even 
without guidance. Whatever the technological advantage may be, it 
may come only at the price of a significant worsening of the team's 
sociology. 

The opposite approach would be one in which every new undertaking 
is run as a pilot project. To the extent that there was a 
standard way to carry out the work, that would be the only way you 
weren't allowed to carry it out. The standard would be for at least 
one part of the effort to be run in a nonstandard way. (This seems 
to be an informal rule within certain divisions of Fujitsu, for 
instance.) 

In the spring of 1932, efficiency experts ran a series of tests at 
the Hawthorne Western Electric Company to determine the effects of 
various environmental parameters on productivity. They tried raising 
the light level, and they noted that productivity went up. Then 
they tried lowering the light level, and they noted that productivity 
went up higher still. They speculated that turning the lights off 
entirely might send productivity through the roof. What seemed to 
be happening was that the change itself wasn't as important as the 
act of changing. People were charmed by differentness, they liked 
the attention, they were intrigued by novelty. This has come to be 
called the Hawthorne Effect. Loosely stated, it says that people 
perform better when they're trying something new. 

A careful study of the literature of productivity improvement 
could convince you that all productivity improvements are due to the 
Hawthorne Effect. Invariably, a paper that touts the wonderful 
benefits of X is reporting on productivity gains when X was first 
introduced. You almost never hear of a study that analyzes ten-yearold 
"improvements" to see if they are still worthwhile. They probably 
aren't. With only a modicum of cynicism, we subscribe to the 
view that the Hawthorne Effect accounts for most productivity 
gains. 




To allow the Hawthorne Effect to work for you, you have to 
make nonstandard approaches the rule. Whatever standard there is 
should be brief and gentle. The total of all standards imposed upon 
your people should be described in no more than ten pages. (This is 
no pipe dream; many organizations that have given up on the 
Methodology-as-Law approach end up with ten-page standards 
manuals.) You ought to be prepared to grant exceptions to even this 
loose guide. This gives you a development environment consistent 
with the views of that famous business sage Mao Tse-tung: 

Let a hundred flowers blossom
and let a hundred schools of thought contend.


Of course Mao didn't really mean it, but we do. 


PART IV


GROWING PRODUCTIVE TEAMS


Think backover a particularly enjoyable work experience from 
your career. What was it that made the experience such a pleasure? 
The simplistic answer is, "Challenge." Good work experiences 
have always gota fairmeasure ofchallenge about them. 

Now think of a specific enjoyable memory from that period, 
Play it over in your mind like a videotape. Maybe it was a meeting 
or a bull session or an all-nighter or the breakfast that followed one. 
If you're like most of us, such memories are vivid and surprisingly 
complete. You can hear the sounds and individual voices, you can 
see expressions on faces, you're aware of the setting. your 
mental videotape now and examine a single frame in detail. Where 
is the challenge? We're willing to bet that it doesnft figure into your 
memory at all, or if it does, it's a remote part of the background. 

What's in the foreground of most of our prized work memories 
is team interaction. When a group of people fuse into a 
meaningful whole, the entire character of the work changes. The 
challenge of the work is important, but not in and of itself; it is 
important because it gives us something to focus on together. The 
challenge is the instrument for our coming together. In the test 
work groups, the ones in which people have the most fun and 
perform at their upper limits, team interactions are everything. They 
are the reason that people stick it out, put their all into the work, 
overcome enormous obstacles. 

People work better and have more fun when the team comes 
together. Part IV looks into the concept of the successfully bonded 
team and things you can do to help such teams 



Chapter 18 

THE WHOLE IS GREATER
THAN THE SUM OF THE PARTS


We tend to use the word team fairly loosely in the business 
world, calling any group of people assigned to work together a 
"team." But many of these groups just don't seem like teams. They 
don't have a common definition of success or any identifiable team 
spirit. Something is missing. What is missing is a phenomenon we 
callye//. 

Concept of the Jelled Team 

A jelled team is a group of people so strongly knit that the whole is 
greater than the sum of the parts. The production of such a team is 
greater than that of the same people working in unjelled form. Just 
as important, the enjoyment that people derive from their work is 
greater than what you'd expect given the nature of the work itself. 
In some cases, jelled teams working on assignments that others 
would declare downright dull have a simply marvelous time. 

Once a team begins to jell, the probability of success goes up 
dramatically. The team can become almost unstoppable, a juggernaut 
for success. Managing these juggernaut teams is a real pleasure. 
You spend most of your time just getting obstacles out of their 
way, clearing the path so that bystanders don't get trampled underfoot: 
"Here they come, folks. Stand back and hold onto your hats." 
They don't need to be managed in the traditional sense, and they 
certainly don't need to be motivated. They've got momentum. 

The reasons for this effect are not so complex: Teams by their 
very nature are formed around goals. (Think of the sports team: 


124 PEOPLEWARE 

Could it even exist without a goal?) Prior to a team's jelling, the 
individuals on the team might have had a diversity of goals. But as 
part of the jelling process, they have all bought on to the common 
goal. This corporate goal takes on an enhanced importance because 
of its significance to the group. Even though the goal itself may 
seem arbitrary to team members, they pursue it with enormous 
energy. 

Management by Hysterical Optimism 

Some managers are disturbed by the sentiments of the preceding 
paragraph. They find it distasteful to consider any artifice for getting 
workers to accept corporate goals. Why should we need to form 
elaborate social units to do that? After all, professional developers 
are supposed to accept their employer's goals as a condition of 
employment. That's what it means to be a professional. 

Believing that workers will automatically accept organizational 
goals is the sign of naive managerial optimism. The mechanism by 
which individuals involve themselves in the organization's objectives 
is more complex than that. You wouldn't be surprised to 
learn, for example, that the fellow you know as a database specialist 
is more inclined to describe himself as a father, a boy scout leader, 
and a member of the local school board. In these roles, he makes 
thoughtful value judgments all the time. What would be a surprise 
is if he stopped making value judgments when he arrived at work. 
He doesn't He is continually at work examining each claim for his 
individual energies and loyalty. Organizational goals come in for 
constant scrutiny by the people who work for the organization, and 
most of those goals are judged to be awfully arbitrary. 

The dilemma here is that as boss, you have probably accepted 
the corporate goal (bring the project home by next April for less than 
$750,000), and accepted it wholeheartedly. If your staff isn't just 
as enthusiastic, you're disappointed. Their lack of interest might 
seem almost treasonous to you. But hold on here, is it possible that 
your own strong identification with a corporate goal stems from 
something beyond mere professionalism? Isn't it true that some artful 
engineering on the part of your boss and the powers above has 
made that corporate goal line up exactly with one of your own? 
Meeting the corporate aims is certain to lead directly to more authority 
and responsibility for you: "Today the Sysboombah Project, 
tomorrow the world!" Throughout the upper ranks of the organization, 
there is marvelous ingenuity at work to be sure that each man



THE WHOLE IS GREATER THAN THE SUM OF THE PARTS 125 

ager has a strong personal incentive to accept the corporate goals. 
Only at the bottom, where the real work is performed, does this 
ingenuity fail. There we count on "professionalism" and nothing 
else to assure that people are all pulling in the same direction. Lots 
of luck. 

If you work for the Save the Snaildarters Foundation or the 
First Fiberoni Church of Holy Purity or any other organization in 
which all employees are bound together by common belief, then you 
may be able to count on their natural affinity for the organization's 
goals. Otherwise forget it. While the executive committee may get 
itself all heated up over a big increase in profits, this same objective 
is pretty small potatoes to people at the bottom of the heap. PROFIT 
UP ONE BILLION DOLLARS AT MEGALITHIC INC. Ho-hum. COMPANY 
LOGS RECORD QUARTER. Zzzzzzzz. 

/ once ran a telecommunications project for a large 
consumer finance company. This organization was in 
the business of lending money to poor people at outlandishly 
high rates of interest, a business that is 
illegal in twenty-three states. Increasing the company's 
already huge profit was not something the average 
worker could easily identify with but management 
seemed to think it was. A delegation came to talk to me 
late one Friday afternoon. The company's chances for 
the best second quarter in history were in our hands, 
they said. They asked me to share this fact with the 
rest of the team, "to focus their efforts." I had never 
worked on a more focused team in my life, but I dutifully 
passed the word on the next morning. (They were 
so fired up that the whole team was in, even though it 
was a Saturday). The energy went out of the team like 
wind out of a sail. The chief programmer summed it all 
up, "Who gives a rat's ass for their second quarter?" 
Half an hour later, they'd all gone home. 

—TDM 

Getting the system built was an arbitrary goal, but the team had 
accepted it. It was what they had formed around. From the time of 
jelling, the team itself had been the real focus for their energies. 
They were in it for joint success, the pleasure of achieving the goal, 
any goal, together. Refocusing their attention on the company's 


126 PEOPLEWARE 

interest in the project didn't help. It just made success seem trivial 
and meaningless. 

The Guns of Navarone 

Goals of corporations are always going to seem arbitrary to people—
corporations seem arbitrary to people—but the arbitrariness of 
goals doesn't mean no one is ever going to accept them. If it did, 
we wouldn't have sports. The goals in sports are always utterly arbitrary. 
The Universe doesn't care whether the little white ball goes 
between the posts at Argentina's end of the field or those at Italy's. 
But a lot of people get themselves very involved in the outcome. 
Their involvement is a function of the social units they belong to. 

Those at the periphery of a team may be mildly interested in 
the team's success or failure, but their interest is tiny compared to 
that of the team members. People who work on jelled teams often 
get so involved that they're psyched up enough to storm the guns of 
Navarone, all just to pass the version 3 acceptance test for the pension 
trust system. You have to remind them that what they're striving 
to accomplish is not the Moral Equivalent of War. 

In spite of the useful energy and enthusiasm that characterize 
jelled teams, managers don't take particular pains to foster them. 
Part of the reason is an imperfect understanding of why teams matter. 
The manager who is strongly motivated toward goal attainment 
is likely to observe that teams don't attain goals; people on the 
teams attain goals. Virtually all of the component tasks required to 
meet the objective are performed by the individuals who make up the 
team. Most of this work is done by individuals working alone. 

There is very little true teamwork required in most of our 
work. But teams are still important, for they serve as a device to get 
everyone pulling in the same direction. 

The purpose of a team is not goal attainment but 
goal alignment. 

When the team is fulfilling its purpose, team members are more 
effective because they're more directed. 


THE WHOLE IS GREATER THAN THE SUM OF THE PARTS 127 

Signs of a Jelled Team 

A few very characteristic signs indicate that a jelled team has 
occurred. The most important of these is low turnover during projects 
and in the middle of well-defined tasks. The team members 
aren't going anywhere till the work is done. Things that matter 
enormously prior to jell (money, status, position for advancement) 
matter less or not at all after jell. People certainly aren't about to 
leave their team for a rinky-dink consideration like a little more 
salary. Sadly, managers often miss this strong indication of their 
own success. They are disinclined to pay attention to turnover even 
when it's killing them; when turnover is low, they don't think about 
it at all. 

Jelled teams are usually marked by a strong sense of identity. 
The teams you hear discussed in the industry have colorful names: 
the "Okie Coders" at General Electric, or the "Gang of Four" at 
DuPont, or the "Chaos Group" at Cincinnati Gas & Electric. 
Teammates may all use the same catch phrases and share many in-
jokes. There may be obvious team space. The teams may congregate 
at lunch or hang out at the same watering hole after work. 

There is a sense ofeliteness on a good team. Team members 
feel they're part of something unique. They feel they're better than 
the run of the mill. They have a cocky, SWAT Team attitude that 
may be faintly annoying to people who aren't part of the group. 

There is invariably a feeling ofjoint ownership of the product 
built by the jelled team. Participants are pleased to have their names 
grouped together on a product or a part of one. The individual is 
eager for peer review. The team space is decorated with views of 
the product as it approaches completion. 

The final sign of a jelled team is the obvious enjoyment that 
people take in their work. Jelled teams just feel healthy. The interactions 
are easy and confident and warm. 

Teams and Cliques 

If it made you at all uneasy to read about jelled teams sticking to 
themselves and feeling slightly superior to the rest of the world, 


128 PEOPLEWARE 

you're not the only one. We can almost hear you thinking, "Wait a 
minute, what these guys are calling a 'team' may be what we would 
call a 'clique.' Teams may be good, but aren't cliques something to 
be avoided at all cost?" 

The difference between a team and a clique is like the difference 
between a breeze and a draft. Breeze and draft have identical 
meanings: They both mean "cool current of air." If you find that 
cool current of air delightful, you call it a breeze; if you find it 
annoying, you call it a draft. The connotations are different, but the 
denotation is the same. Similarly, there is no difference in denotation 
between a team and a clique, but the connotations are opposite. 
People use team when the tight bonding of the jelled working 
group is pleasing to them. And they use clique when it represents a 
threat. 

Fear of cliques is a sign of managerial insecurity. The greater 
the insecurity, the more frightening the idea of a clique can be. 
There are reasons for this: Managers are often not true members of 
their teams (more about this in Chapter 23), so the loyalties that 
exclude them are stronger than the ones that bind them into the 
group. The loyalties within the group are stronger than those tying 
the group to the company. Then there is the awful thought that a 
tightly knit team may leave en masse and take all of its energy and 
enthusiasm over to the competition. For all these reasons, the insecure 
manager is threatened by cliques. He or she would feel better 
working with a staff of uniform plastic people, identical, interchangeable, 
and unbonded. 

The jelled work group may be cocky and self-sufficient, irritating 
and exclusive, but it does more to serve the manager's real 
goals than any assemblage of interchangeable parts could ever do. 


Chapter 19
THE BLACK TEAM


The value of jelled teams will be obvious to you if you have 
already had the enjoyable experience of working on one. But just in 
case you haven't,: this chapter is intended to give you some sense of 
what they're like. Presented below is the story of a well-known 
team that began to make its mark in the early 1960s. Some of the 
lore of this team must surely be exaggerated, but it makes a good 
yarn, and at least most of it is true. 

The Stuff of Which Legends Are Made 

Back in the dawn of time (relatively speaking), there was a company 
in upper New York State that made large blue computers. The 
company also made software to run on these computers. Customers 
of this company were nice enough folks, but just between us, they 
could be awfully poor sports about software delivered with bugs. 
For a while, the company put its efforts into training the customers 
to make them more tolerant of bugs. But this approach didn't work 
out, so they bit the bullet and decided to get rid of the bugs instead. 

The easy and obvious approach was to have the programmers 
remove all bugs prior to delivery. For some reason this didn't work 
too well either. It seems that the programmers (at least the ones 
back in those days) were rather too inclined to believe the best of 
their programs. Try as they might, they couldn't find the last 
remaining bugs, so they often declared the software to be done 
when there were still lots of bugs. 

129 




Finding the last bug was hard, but some testers were better 
than others. The company formed a group of these particularly talented 
testers and gave them the charter to do final testing on critical 
software before it was sent to the customers. Thus was born the 
legendary Black Team. 

The Black Team was initially made up of people who had 
proved themselves to be slightly better at testing than their peers. 
They were slightly more motivated. They also were testing code 
that had been written by someone else, so they were free of the cognitive 
dissonance that hampers developers when testing their own 
programs. All in all, those who formed the team might have 
expected it to achieve at least a modest improvement in product 
quality, but they didn't expect more than that. What they got was 
much more than that. 

The most surprising thing about the Black Team was not how 
good it was at the beginning, but how much it improved during the 
next year. Some magic was happening: The team was forming a 
personality of its own. This personality was being shaped by an 
adversary philosophy of testing that evolved among group members, 
a philosophy that they had to want and expect to find defects. 
They weren't rooting for the developers at all, quite the opposite. 
They were delighting in submitting the program (and the programmer) 
to a sequence that was not just a test, but an ordeal. Bringing 
your program in for Black Team testing was like appearing before 
Ming the Merciless. 

Pitiful Earthlings, What Can Save You Now? 

At first it was simply a joke that the tests they ran were mean and 
nasty, and that the team members actually loved to make your code 
fail. Then it wasn't a joke at all. They began to cultivate an image 
of destroyers. What they destroyed was not only your code but 
your whole day. They did monstrously unfair things to elicit failure, 
overloading the buffers, comparing empty files, and keying in 
outrageous input sequences. Grown men and women were reduced 
to tears by watching their programs misbehave under the demented 
handling of these fiends. The worse they made you feel, the more 
they enjoyed it. 

To enhance the growing image of nastiness, team members 
began to dress in black (hence the name Black Team). They took to 
cackling horribly whenever a program failed. Some of the members 
grew long mustaches that they could twirl in Simon Legree fashion. 


THE BLACK TEAM 131 

They'd get together and work out ever more awful testing ploys. 
Programmers began to mutter about the diseased minds on the Black 
Team. 

Needless to say, the company was delighted. Every defect the 
team found was one that the customers wouldn't find. The team 
was a success. It succeeded as a test group, but more important for 
our purposes here, it succeeded as a social unit. People on the team 
got such a kick out of what they were doing that colleagues outside 
the team were positively jealous. The black outfits and the silly 
exaggerated behavior were part of the fun, but there was something 
much more fundamental going on. The chemistry within the group 
had become an end in itself. 

Footnote 

Over time, members of the team moved on one at a time to other 
things. Since the team function was important to the company, 
departing members were replaced immediately. This continued until 
finally there wasn't a single member left of the original group. But 
there was still a Black Team. The team survived the loss of all its 
original staff, and it emerged with its energy and its personality 
intact. 


Chapter 20
TEAMICIDE


What's called for here is a concise chapter entitled "Making 
Teams Jell at Your Company." It should have half a dozen simple 
prescriptions for good team formation. These prescriptions should 
be enough to guarantee jelled teams. In the planning stage of this 
work, that is exactly the chapter we expected to write. We were 
confident. How difficult could it be to cut to the heart of the matter 
and give the reader practical tools to aid the process of making teams 
jell? We would apply all our skills, all our experience; we would 
overwhelm the problem with logic and pure brilliance. That's how 
it looked in the planning stage.... 

Between plan and execution, there were a few distressing 
encounters with reality. The first of these was that we just couldn't 
come up with the six prescriptions needed for the chapter. We got 
stuck at zero. We'd been prepared to scale our expectations down a 
bit, but not this much. ("Zero Things You Can Do to Make Teams 
Jell"?) It seemed clear that something was wrong with the underlying 
notion of the chapter. What was wrong was the whole idea of 
making teams jell. You can't make teams jell. You can hope they 
will jell; you can cross your fingers; you can act to improve the odds 
of jelling; but you can't make it happen. The process is much too 
fragile to be controlled. 

Part of our scaling down of expectations involved a change in 
vocabulary. We stopped talking about building teams, and talked 
instead of growing them. The agricultural image seemed right. 
Agriculture isn't entirely controllable. You enrich the soil, you plant 
seeds, you water according to the latest theory, and you hold your 

132



TEAMICIDE 133 

breath. You just might get a crop; you might not. If it all comes up 
roses, you'll feel fine, but next year you'll be sweating it out again. 
That's pretty close to how team formation works. 

Back to brainstorming mode: We began looking for "Six 
Things You Can Do to Make Team Formation Possible." It was still 
hard. At last, in desperation, we tried a trick called inversion, 
described in Edward deBono's Lateral Thinking. When you're 
stuck trying to solve a problem, deBono suggests that rather than 
looking for ways to achieve your goal, look for ways to achieve the 
exact opposite of your goal. This can have the effect of clearing 
away the brain's cobwebs that keep you from being creative. So 
instead of looking for ways to make team formation possible, we 
began to think of ways to make it impossible. That was easy. In no 
time at all, we came up with lots of sure-fire ways to inhibit the formation 
of teams and disrupt project sociology. These measures, 
taken together, constitute a strategy we dubbed teamicide. Our short 
list of teamicide techniques is presented below: 

. defensive management 
. bureaucracy 
. physical separation 
. fragmentation of people' s time 
. quality reduction of the product 
. phony deadlines 
. clique control 
Some of these techniques will look awfully familiar. They are 
things that companies do all the time. 

Defensive Management 

It makes good sense for you the manager to take a defensive posture 
in most areas of risk. If you must work with a piece of failure-
prone gear, you get a backup; if the client is inclined to vacillate, you 
take pains to nail down the product specifications; if a contract vendor 
tends to "forget" promises, you publish minutes after each 
meeting. 

There's one area, though, where defensiveness will always 
backfire: You can't protect yourself against your own people's 
incompetence. If your staff isn't up to the job at hand, you will fail. 
Of course, if the people are badly suited to the job, you should get 
new people. But once you've decided to go with a given group, 


134 PEOPLEWARE 

your best tactic is to trust them. Any. defensive measure taken to 
guarantee success in spite of them will only make things worse. It 
may give you some relief from worry in the short term, but it won't 
help in the long run, and it will poison any chance for the team to 
jell. 

/ found myself one day giving Consultant's Speech 
Number 9B to a project group, chastising them because 
they'd failed to get client approval for their emerging 
concept of a new system. They all looked faintly embarrassed. 
Finally one of them said, "We all agree that 
the client ought to be seeing this stuff. But our boss 
has laid down a firm rule that nothing will ever be 
shown to people outside the project unless it has his 
approval." She went on to explain that the boss was so 
swamped that months of work had piled up in his In-
box. What option did they have? They were just plugging 
away in the dark knowing full well that most of 
what they were producing wouldn't pass muster with 
the client staff when it was finally shown to them. 

—TRL 

The boss didn't trust his own people. He was worried they 
might show something that was wrong to client personnel. He was 
worried that their errors might reflect badly on him. Only his own 
judgment was competent; anyone else's was suspect. 

If you're the manager, of course you're going to feel that your 
judgment is better than that of people under you. You have more 
experience and perhaps a higher standard of excellence than they 
have; that's how you got to be the manager. At any point in the 
project where you don't interpose your own judgment, your people 
are more likely to make a mistake. So what? Let them make some 
mistakes. That doesn't mean you can't override a decision (very 
occasionally) or give specific direction to the project. But if the staff 
comes to believe it's not allowed to make any errors of its own, the 
message that you don't trust them comes through loud and clear. 
There is no message you can send that will better inhibit team formation. 


Most managers give themselves excellent grades on knowing 
when to trust their people and when not to. But in our experience, 
too many managers err on the side of mistrust. They follow the 


TEAMICIDE 135 

basic premise that their people may operate completely autonomously, 
as long as they operate correctly. This amounts to no 
autonomy at all. The only freedom that has any meaning is the 
freedom to proceed differently from the way your manager would 
have proceeded. This is true in a broader sense, too: The right to 
be right (in your manager's eyes or in your government's eyes) is 
irrelevant; it's only the right to be wrong that makes you free. 

The most obvious defensive management ploys are prescriptive 
Methodologies ("My people are too dumb to build systems 
without them") and technical interference by the manager. Both 
are doomed to fail in the long run. In addition, they make for 
efficient teamicide. People who feel untrusted have little inclination 
to bond together into a cooperative team. 

Bureaucracy 

Studies conducted by Capers Jones in the 1970s and 1980s reported 
on systems development costs by work category. One of the 
categories was "Paperwork." What Jones calls paperwork is 
more or less mindless paper pushing, since the thinking time necessary 
to decide what to put on the paper is categorized as some 
other activity, such as analysis, design, or test planning. In other 
words, his "paperwork" category is pure bureaucracy. Jones concluded 
that paperwork is the second largest category of systems 
development work. It accounts for more than thirty percent of the 
cost of producing a given product. 

There is a depressing modern trend to make development 
workers more and more into bureaucrats. Perhaps this is a sign of 
epidemic defensive management. But while the trend is global, it 
is not at all uniform. We know of companies in which the 
development groups look and feel like a bureaucratic nightmare 
by Kafka, and other companies in which the paperwork burden is 
minuscule. 

Mindless paper pushing is a waste. It ought to be attacked 
because it keeps people from working. But our point here is a 
slightly different one. It is that bureaucracy hurts team formation. 
The team needs to believe in whatever goal it forms around. That 
goal can be arbitrary, but at least it has to exist. There has to be 
some evidence that management believes in it. Just telling your 
people that the goal matters won't be enough if you also have to 
tell them they should spend a third of their time pushing paper. 
Paper pushers just can't get themselves into SWAT Team mode. 
They can't see themselves hellbent for success. 


136 PEOPLEWARE 

Physical Separation 

When the Furniture Police makes its case for the Zippo-Flippo 
Modular Office System, all the talk is of "flexibility." But when 
it comes time to flex a bit to put a work group together, the long 
faces come out. "We can't disrupt everything and move stuff 
around over our lovely carpet just to get these four people into 
adjacent space. Can't they use telephones?" The result is that 
what could be a tightly bound team is scattered over multiple 
floors or even in different buildings. The specific work interactions 
may not suffer terribly, but there is no casual interaction. 
Group members may grow stronger bonds to nongroup neighbors, 
just because they see more of them. There is no group space, no 
immediate and constant reinforcement, no chance of a group culture 
forming. (You couldn't imagine Black Team members all 
dressing in black if their workspaces were not together; they'd be 
constantly interacting with people who weren't in on the joke, 
who just thought they were bizarre, and the whole funny bit 
would die with a whimper.) 

Physical separation of people who are expected to interact 
closely doesn't make much sense anyway. Neighboring workers 
are a source of noise and disruption. When they're all on the 
same team, they tend to go into quiet mode at the same time, so 
there is less interruption of flow. Putting them together also gives 
them opportunity for the casual interaction that is so necessary for 
team formation. 

Fragmentation of Time 

One of my clients is an agency of the Australian 
government. During one consulting call, I collected 
data indicating that the average worker there 
was involved in four or more different projects. I 
complained about this to the Commissioner. He 
said it was regrettable, but just a fact of life. 
People's duties were fragmented because their 
skills and knowledge made them indispensable to 
efforts other than the principal ones they were 
assigned to. He said it was inevitable. I said it 
was nonsense. I proposed that he make it a specific 
policy that people be assigned to one and only 
one project at a time and that the policy be written 
down and widely distributed. He was game. A 


TEAMICIDE 137 

year later, when I returned, the average worker was 
assigned to fewer than two projects. 

—TDM 

Fragmentation is bad for team formation, but it's also bad for 
efficiency. (Perhaps you've begun to pick up a trend here.) Peoplecan keep track of only so many human interactions. When they try 
to be part of four working groups, they have four times as manyinteractions to track. They spend all their time changing gears. 

No one can be part of multiple jelled teams. The tight interactions 
of the jelled team are exclusive. Enough fragmentation and 
teams just won't jell. The saddest thing is we allow far more fragmentation 
than is really necessary. We tend to concede this battle 
without even a fight. Simply saying that a goal is to assign people 
only one piece of work at a time can result in significant reductions 
of fragmentation, and thus give teams a real chance to form. 

The Quality-Reduced Product 

The heading used here is a facetious one; nobody really talks about 
quality-reduced products. What they talk about is cost-reduced 
products. But it usually boils down to the same thing. The typical 
steps we take to deliver a product in less time result in lower quality.
Often the product's end user gives willing consent to this trade-off 
(less quality for earlier, cheaper delivery). But such concessions 
can be very painful for the developers. Their self-esteem and enjoyment 
are undermined by the necessity of building a product of 
clearly lower quality than what they are capable of. 

An early casualty of quality reduction is whatever sense of 
team identification the group has been able to build. Co-workers 
who are developing a shoddy product don't even want to look each 
other in the eye, There is no joint sense of accomplishment in store 
for them. They know that there will be a general sense of relief 
when they can stop doing what they're doing. At the end of the 
project, they'll make every effort to separate themselves from other 
members of the group, and get on to better things. 

Phony Deadlines 

In Chapter 3, we made the point that tight deadlines can sometimes 
be demotivating. But there are certainly cases where a tight but not 


138 PEOPLEWARE 

impossible deadline can constitute an enjoyable challenge to the 
team. What's never going to help, however, is aphony deadline. 
When the manager intones, "We absolutely must be done by ," 
group members can barely keep their eyes from rolling. They've 
been there before. They know the whole routine. 

Maybe phony deadlines used to work. Maybe there were once 
workers so naive that they actually believed what they heard. When 
the boss said the job "reeely reeely has to be done by January," 
maybe they just accepted it and buckled down. Maybe. But it certainly 
doesn't work that way anymore. The people on your staff will 
know if they're being bamboozled. If you say the product absolutely 
has to be out the door by some arbitrary date, they will ask, 
"Why? Will the universe grind to a halt if we're late? Will the company 
fold? Will the nation slide into the sea? Will Western 
Civilization break down?" 

In the typical phony deadline spiel, the manager announces 
that the work must be done on such and such a date. The date mentioned 
is impossible to meet, and everyone knows it. The effort will 
certainly slip (so much for the idea that the deadline is absolute). 
The work has been defined in such a way that success is impossible. 
The message to the workers is clear: The boss is a Parkinsonian 
robot with no respect or concern for them. The boss believes they 
won't do a stroke of work except under duress. Don't expect a 
jelled team on that project. 

Clique Control 

A participant at one of our seminars made this observation: "The 
only time our management shows any awareness of teams is when it 
takes specific steps to break them up." There may be an explicit 
policy that teams can't be allowed to stay together from one job to 
another. Or, there may be a policy that projects winding down have 
to be de-staffed smoothly over time so that the personnel organization 
can steer people efficiently into new projects. This assures that 
teams will be broken up. Still other organizations take no specific 
steps to disband teams, but miss every opportunity to keep them 
together. 

The pleasures of team activity and the energy that is produced 
by team interaction are articles of faith in our society. How did 
business organizations ever come to be so apathetic or even antipathetic 
toward teams? Part of the reason is insecurity, as indicated 
in Chapter 19. Another part is a conspicuously low consciousness 


TEAMICIDE 139 

of teams in upper management. The team phenomenon, as we've 
described it, is something that happens only at the bottom of the 
hierarchy. For all the talk about "management teams," there really is 
no such thing—certainly never jelled teams at the managerial level. 
When managers are bonded into teams, it's only because they serve 
dual roles: manager on the one hand and group member on the 
other. They become accepted as part-time peers by the people they 
manage. As you go higher and higher in the organization chart, the 
concept ofjelled teams recedes further andfurther into oblivion. 

Once More Over the Same Depressing Ground 

Most organizations don't set out consciously to kill teams, They 
just act that way. 


Chapter 21
A SPAGHETTI DINNER


Picture yourself a technical worker who's just been assigned 
to a new project. You know the manager and most of the other 
project personnel by name, but that's about it. Your first day on the 
new project is next Monday. On Wednesday before that Monday, 
you get a call from your boss-to-be. She's having a get-together, 
she says, for people on the new project. Is there any chance you 
could come by her place on Thursday evening for dinner with the 
rest of the team? You're free and want to meet the new group, so 
you accept. 

When you arrive, the whole group is sitting around the living 
room drinking beer and telling war stories. You join in and tell a 
few of your own. The client liaison, who has also been invited, 
does a bit about his department head. Everybody has another beer. 
You begin to wonder about food. There is no smell of anything 
cooking and no sign of anyone working in the kitchen. Finally your 
boss-to-be admits that she hasn't had time to make dinner, and suggests 
that the whole crew walk over to a nearby supermarket and 
assemble the makings of a meal. "I guess we must be capable of 
putting a spaghetti dinner together." 

Team Effects Beginning to Happen 

Off you go. In the supermarket, you amble as a group through the 
aisles. Nobody takes charge. Your boss seems to have anything on 
her mind but dinner. She chats and laughs and offers up a story 
about the IRS. In spite of a general lack of direction, some things 


A SPAGHETTI DINNER 141 

do get thrown into the cart. One fellow has already gotten the salad 
pretty well taken care of. There is some talk of making a clam 
sauce, and when nobody's opposed, two of your new mates begin 
to talk out the details. You decide to make your patented garlic 
bread. Someone else picks out a bottle of Chianti. Finally there is a 
consensus that enough stuff is in the cart for dinner. 

Back at the ranch, you all set down your bags of groceries and 
the boss grabs another beer and tells about a new software tool. 
Little by little the party gravitates toward the kitchen where some 
preparations are beginning. Your boss gives no direction, but she 
pitches in to chop onions when someone suggests that's what's 
needed. You start the garlic and olive oil simmering in a pan. There 
is a sauce bubbling and some spaghetti boiling. Gradually a dinner 
comes together. You all eat till you're full and then share in the 
cleanup chores. 

What's Been Going on Here? 

So far, nobody has billed a single day of effort to the project, but 
you've just had your first success as a group. Success breeds success, 
and productive harmony breeds more productive harmony. 
Your chances ofjelling into a meaningful team are enhanced by your 
very first experience together. 

Presented this way, the spaghetti dinner may seem like a contrivance 
on the manager's part. But it probably wasn't and wouldn't 
have seemed like it had you been there. If you had asked the manager 
in question what she had in mind for the evening, she would 
have probably replied in total sincerity, "Dinner." A natural manager 
has got a subconscious feel for what's good for the team. This 
feel may govern decisions throughout the project. The entire 
experience is organized for small, easy joint successes. You have to 
look twice to see the manager's hand in any of this, it just seems to 
be happening. 

Variations on the story of the spaghetti dinner have been told 
to us in different forms and about different managers for years. The 
common thread is that good managers provide frequent easy opportunities 
for the team to succeed together. The opportunities may be 
tiny pilot sub-projects, or demonstrations, or simulations, anything 
that gets the team quickly into the habit of succeeding together. The 
best success is the one in which there is no evident management, in 
which the team works as a genial aggregation of peers. The best 
boss is the one who can manage this over and over again without the 


142 PEOPLEWARE 

team members knowing they've been "managed." These bosses are 
viewed bytheirpeers asjustlucky. Everythingseems tobreak right 
for them. They get a fired-up team of people, the project comes 
together quickly, and everyone stays enthusiastic through the end. 
These managers never break into a sweat. It looks so easy that no 
one canbelievethey aremanaging atall. 


Chapter 22
OPEN KIMONO


Growingjelled teams is a fairly chancy matter. Nobody does 
it consistently. Nobody can make it happen, particularly when it 
would be most useful. Sometimes the mix is wrong. And sometimes 
the group is staffed with folks who aren't disposed to become 
part of a team; they're loners and always will be. 

In his book People and Project Management,, Rob Thomsett 
analyzes certain of the pathologies that interfere with team formation. 
It makes fascinating reading. However, few of these pathologies 
are treatable. About the only remedy is to remove certain members 
from the project because they hurt the chances of a team to jell. 
That may sound okay in the abstract, but in any specific case you're 
likely to find such a remedy plain silly. The very person you'd be 
inclined to do without for this reason will probably be a star in many 
other respects. Lots of efforts have to proceed (and succeed) without 
jelled teams. 

Having said all that, we know this indisputable fact: Some 
managers are pretty good at helping teams to jell. They succeed 
more often than not. In this chapter, we examine one characteristic 
of these team-oriented managers. 

Calling in Well 

Chances are you've heard of people calling in sick. You 
may have called in sick a few times yourself. But have 
you ever thought of calling in well? 


144 PEOPLEWARE 

It'd go like this: You'd get the boss on the line and say, 
"Listen, I've been sick ever since I started working 
here, but today I'm well and I won't be in anymore." 

—Even Cowgirls Get the Blues 

When people talk about an organization that you'd have to be 
"sick" to work for, they're not referring to physiological sickness. 
They mean that working in such a place would require them to disregard 
certain mental survival rules, rules that protect the well-being 
of the psychological self. The most important of these rules has to 
do with self-regard. A job situation that hurts your self-regard is 
itself "sick." 

The person who calls in well is ready for work that enhances 
self-regard. Assignment to such work is an acknowledgment of 
certain areas of competence, and it provides autonomy and responsibility 
in these areas. Managers of well workers are careful to 
respect that autonomy, once granted. They know that a worker's 
failure will reflect badly on the boss, but that's just the breaks of the 
game. They're prepared to suffer the occasional setback, a direct 
result of failure by one of their people. When it happens, they suspect 
it will be a failure that they themselves would never have 
caused, had they been doing the work rather than managing it. But 
so what? You give your best shot to putting the right person in the 
position, but once he or she is there, you don't second-guess. 

This Open Kimono attitude is the exact opposite of defensive 
management. You take no steps to defend yourself from the people 
you've put into positions of trust. And all the people under you are 
in positions of trust. A person you can't trust with any autonomy is 
of no use to you. 

One of my first bosses was Jerry Wiener, who had run 
a development team for General Electric on the Dartmouth 
time-sharing project. He later formed a small 
high-technology company. At the time I came along, the 
company was about to enter into a contract that was 
larger than anything it had ever done before. The 
entire staff was assembled as our corporate lawyer 
handed Jerry the contract and told him to read it and 
sign on the last page. "I don't read contracts," Jerry 


OPEN KIMONO 145 

said, and started to sign. "Oh, wait a minute," said the 
lawyer, "let me go over it one more time." 

—TDM 

The lesson here is not that you should sign contracts without 
reading them (though that may not be a terrible rule in cases where 
you pay counsel to look out for your interests). If you've got the 
wrong counsel, you're in deep bananas anyway. Managers who are 
most proficient at getting the work done are likely to be way out of 
their depth in evaluating contracts for the work. Reading contracts 
may be little more than a conceit. Jerry had taken great pains to hire 
the best counsel he could find. He'd certainly looked over other 
instances of the man's work. This was not the time to be defensive; 
it was the time to make it clear to everyone that the boss was 
assuming and depending on competence around him. 

It's heady and a little frightening to know that the boss has put 
part of his or her reputation into the subordinates' hands. It brings 
out the best in everyone. The team has something meaningful to 
form around. They're not just getting a job done. They're making 
sure that the trust that's been placed in them is rewarded. It is this 
kind of Open Kimono management that gives teams their best 
chance to form. 

The Getaway Ploy 

The most common means by which bosses defend themselves from 
their own people is direct physical oversight. They wander through 
the work areas, looking for people goofing off or for incompetence 
about to happen. They are the Parkinsonian Patrol, alert for people 
to kick. Of course, nobody (neither manager nor worker) thinks 
about it that way, since it's so much a part of the corporate culture. 
But the thought of doing without it is inconceivable to many managers. 


A recent consulting assignment involved taking part in 
a project to build a customer information system for a 
California company. The spec was written and we were 
ready to start blueprinting internal design. The boss 
called us all together and handed each person a map 
showing the way to an office in faraway Long Beach. He 


146 PEOPLEWARE 

explained that there was a free conference room there 
where we could worked uninterrupted. He would stay 
behind and fend off all but the most essential phone 
calls. We were told to "come back when you're done." 
More than two weeks later, we came back with a hotshot 
design. He never called or dropped in once during 
the whole period. 

—TRL 

If you've got decent people under you, there is probably 
nothing you can do to improve their chances of success more dramatically 
than to get yourself out of their hair occasionally. Any 
easily separable task is a perfect opportunity. There is no real management 
required for such work. Send them away. Find a remote 
office, hire a conference room, borrow somebody's summer house, 
or put them up at a hotel. Take advantage of off-season rates at ski 
areas or at beaches. Have them go to a conference, and then stay 
over for a few days to work together in peace. (We've heard of at 
least one instance of each of these ploys.) 

Such a plan will cost you some points with your own management 
and peers, because it's so audacious. How can you know, 
they'll ask you, that your people aren't loafing this very minute? 
How can you be sure they won't knock off for lunch at eleven and 
drink away their afternoons? The simple answer is you'll know by 
the product they come back with. By their fruits, ye shall know 
them. If they bring back a carefully thought-out and complete 
result, they worked. If they don't, they didn't. Visual supervision 
is a joke for development workers. Visual supervision is for prisoners. 


Getting away from the office helps in many ways. First of all, 
it removes your highest-priced resource from the distractions and 
interruptions that fritter away so much of their time. You may succeed 
someday in building a productive office environment, a workplace 
where it's at least possible to get something useful done 
between 9 and 5. But you can only do this in the long run. In the 
short run, use any excuse to get your people out. In addition to 
making them more efficient, the getaway and the periods of total 
autonomy give them an improved chance to jell into a high-momentum 
team. 


OPEN KIMONO 147 

There Are Rules and We Do Break Them 

The engineering profession is famous for a kind of development 
mode that doesn't exist elsewhere: the skunkworks project. 
Skunkworks implies that the project is hidden away someplace 
where it can be done without upper management's knowing what's 
going on. This happens when people at the lowest levels believe so 
strongly in the lightness of a product that they refuse to accept management's 
decision to kill it. Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP11, 
one of DEC's most successful products, came to the market in 
this manner. There is a lore about such projects. The amusing thing 
is that skunkworks is really just another word for insubordination, 
Management says no, and the project goes on anyway. 

One of our clients tried to cancel a product that was judged to 
have no market. Cooler heads prevailed and the product was built. 
It became a huge success. The manager who had unsuccessfully 
tried to kill the project (he now had become president of the whole 
company) ordered a medal for the team, with the citation "First 
Annual Prize for Insubordination." He presented it with a speech, 
stating that others seeking the award had better be just as successful. 
Being an insubordinate failure wouldn't get anybody a prize. 

People at all levels know whether some sensible insubordination 
is acceptable or not. People look out for their Open Kimono 
managers. They're determined to make them look good, even 
though the managers may botch an occasional decision. Defensive 
managers are on their own. 

Chickens with Lips 

In the middle 1970s, Larry Constantine was counseling certain client 
companies to help them build a healthy corporate sociology. One of 
the things he advised was for the companies to allow people at the 
lowest level some voice in team selection. As implemented, the idea 
was that the company would post new projects on a central kiosk. 
People would form themselves into candidate teams and then "bid" 
on jobs. If you had a hankering to work with some of your mates, 
you would put your resumes together and make a joint pitch for the 
job. The points in your favor were how well-suited you were to the 
job, how well you complemented each other's capacities, and how 
little it would disrupt other work in the company to assign you as a 


148 PEOPLEWARE 

group to this project. The company picked the best-suited team for 
each job. 

This scheme gave people two unusual degrees of freedom: 
They got to choose the projects they worked on and the people they 
worked with. The surprising rinding was that the first of these factors 
didn't matter very much. Management initially feared that only 
the glamorous projects would be bid for, but it didn't happen that 
way. Even the most mundane projects were bid for. What seemed 
to matter was the chance for people to work with those they wanted 
to work with. 

The idea of an employment audition, presented in Chapter 15, 
has a similar effect. The project members who listen to the audition 
are not just an audience; they have a say in whether the person gets 
the offer. In addition to technical judgment, they're supplying a 
team perspective on how well the candidate will fit in: "I think we 
could work with this guy," or "He seems well-qualified, but he'd 
stick out like a sore thumb in this group." 

Some years ago, we were part of a pretty well-knit working 
group, a group whose members started to have many characteristics 
in common, in particular, a similar sense of humor. We even developed 
a shared theory about humor. This theory held that some 
things are intrinsically funny. Chickens, for instance, are funny, 
but horses aren't. Lips are hilarious, elbows and knees are funny, 
but shoulders are just shoulders. One day we had an audition for a 
new group member. After he'd spoken and left, one of our colleagues 
critiqued, "I guess you can't fault his knowledge. But do 
you think he'd ever come to understand that chickens with lips are 
funny?" The candidate didn't get the job. 

Who?s in Charge Here? 

The best bosses take some chances. They take chances on their 
people. None of this says that good managers don't manage, that 
they don't give direction and make judgments of their own. They 
have to do this all the time. The suggestion here is that they do this 
only by exercising their natural authority. Between master craftsman 
and apprentice there is a bond of natural authority—the master 
knows how to do the work and the apprentice does not. Submitting 
to this kind of authority demeans no one, it doesn't remove incentive, 
it doesn't make it impossible to knit with fellow workers. An 
insecure need for obedience is the opposite of natural authority. It 
says, "Recognize me as a different caste of creature, a manager. I 


OPEN KIMONO 149 

belong to the thinking class. Those beneath me are employed to carry 
out my decisions." 

In the best organizations, thereis natural authority working in 
all directions. The manager is known to be better at some things, 
perhaps setting general directions, negotiating, and hiring, and is 
trusted to do those things. Each of the workers is known to have 
some special area of expertise, and is trusted by all as a natural 
authority in that area. In this atmosphere of Open Kimono, the team 
has its optimal chance to jell. 


Chapter 23 

CHEMISTRY FOR
TEAM FORMATION


Some organizations are famous for their consistent good luck 
in getting well-knit teams to happen. It isn't luck, of course, it's 
chemistry. There is something about those organizations, some 
optimal mix of competence and trust and mutual esteem and well-
person sociology that provides perfect soil for the growth of jelled 
teams. And it's not only team formation that benefits from these 
factors. Everything works better. These organizations are just plain 
healthy. 

Rather than illustrate this with an example from our experience, 
we encourage you to think of one from your own. Have you 
ever been in an organization that simply glowed with health? People 
were at ease, having a good time and enjoying interactions with their 
peers. There was no defensiveness, no sense that single individuals 
were trying to succeed in spite of the efforts of those around them. 
The work was a joint product. Everybody was proud of its quality. 
(At least a glimmer of this healthy glow should be apparent in your 
present situation. If not, perhaps it's time to call in well, and get 
your resume out.) 

What are managers up to in these healthiest companies? A 
quick surface appraisal might convince you they aren't up to much atall. They don't seem busy. They're not giving a lot of directions. 
Whatever their relationship is to the work going on around them, 
they're certainly not doing any of it. 

In organizations with the best chemistry, managers devote 
their energy to building and maintaining healthy chemistry. Depart


150



CHEMISTRY FOR TEAM FORMATION 151 

ments and divisions that glow with health do so because their managers 
make it happen. There is a holistic integrity to their method, 
and so it's hard to break down and analyze the component parts 
(how the parts fit together into a whole is more important than what 
the parts are). But it's still worth a try. 

Presented below is an admittedly simplistic list of the elements 
of a chemistry-building strategy for a healthy organization: 

. Makeacultofquality. 
. Provide lots of satisfying closure. 
. Buildasense of eliteness. 
. Allowandencourageheterogeneity. 
. Preserveandprotect successfulteams. 
. Providestrategic butnottactical direction. 
There are more. We've cited only those elements that have a particular 
effect on team formation. The following subsections provide 
our comments on each of these points. 

The Cult of Quality 

The judgment that a still imperfect product is "close enough" is the 
death knell for a jelling team. There can be no impetus to bind 
together with your cohorts for the joint satisfaction gained from 
delivering mediocre work. The opposite attitude, of "only perfect is 
close enough for us," gives the team a real chance. This cult of 
quality is the strongest catalyst for team formation. 

It binds the team together because it sets them apart from the 
rest of the world. The rest of the world, remember, doesn't give a 
hoot for quality. Oh, it talks a good game, but if quality costs a 
nickel extra, you quickly see the true colors of those who would 
have to shell out the nickel. 

Our friend Lou Mazzucchelli, chairman of Cadre Technologies, 
Inc., was in the market for a paper shredder. He had a salesman 
come in to demonstrate a unit. It was a disaster. It was enormous 
and noisy (it made a racket even when it wasn't shredding). 
Our friend asked about a German-made shredder he'd heard about. 
The salesman was contemptuous. It cost nearly half again as much 
and didn't have a single extra feature, he responded. "All you get 
for that extra money," he said, "is better quality." 




Your marketplace, your product consumers, your clients, and 
your upper management are never going to make die case for high 
quality. Extraordinary quality doesn't make good short-term 
economic sense. When team members develop a cult of quality, 
they always turn out something that's better than what their market 
is asking for. They can do this, but only when protected from 
short-term economics. In the long run, this always pays off. People 
get high on quality and out-do themselves to protect it. 

The cult of quality is what Ken Orr calls "the dirt in the oyster." 
It is a focal point for the team to bind around. 

I Told Her I Loved Her When I Married Her 

It may be news to some, but the human creature needs reassurance 
from time to time that he or she is headed in the right direction. 
Teams of human creatures need it, too. Such reassurance comes 
from what psychologists call closure. Closure is the satisfying 
"thunk" of pieces of the whole falling into place. 

Organizations also have some need for closure. Closure for 
the organization is the successful finish of the work as assigned, 
plus perhaps an occasional confirmation along the way that everything 
is on target (maybe a milestone achieved or a significant partial 
delivery completed). How much confirmation corporations require 
is a function of how much money is at risk. Frequently, closure 
only at the end of a four-year effort is adequate for the needs of the 
organization. 

The problem here is that organizations have far less need for 
closure than do the people who work for them. The prospect of 
four years of work without any satisfying "thunk" leaves everyone 
in the group thinking, "I could be dead before this thing is ever 
done." Particularly when the team is coming together, frequent closure 
is important. Team members need to get into the habit of succeeding 
together and liking it. This is part of the mechanism by 
which the team builds momentum. 

The chemistry-building manager takes pains to divide the 
work into pieces and makes sure that each piece has some substantive 
demonstration of its own completion. Such a manager may 
contrive to deliver a product in twenty versions, even though two 
are sufficient for upper management and the user. It may even be 
necessary to conceal some of these interim versions from the client, 
and build them only for internal confirmation and satisfaction. Each 


CHEMISTRY FOR TEAM FORMATION 153 

new version is an opportunity for closure. Team members get 
warmed up as the moment approaches, they sprint near the very 
end. They get a high from success. It suffuses them with renewed 
energy for the next step. It makes them feel closer together. 

The Elite Team 

In the early 1970s, a vice president of one of our client companies 
sent around a memo on the subject of travel expenses to everyone in 
his division. You may have received similar memos on the topic 
yourself, but this one was different. It said more or less this: "It 
has come to my attention that some of you, when traveling on 
expenses, have been traveling economy class. This is not an economy-
class organization. This is a first-class organization. When 
you fly on business from now on, you will fly first class." Of 
course that memo cost money. The expense was very real and the 
only thing you could balance against it was an enhanced sense of 
eliteness. At least one organization thought that was a valid trade-
off. Couldn't happen in a real-world corporation, you say? It happened 
at Xerox. 

Those who think popcorn is "unprofessional" think team 
eliteness is downright subversive. There is a widespread feeling 
that managers are just not doing their jobs if the team sticks out in 
any way. The group's adherence to a corporate standard of uniformity 
is almost a symbol of the manager's degree of control. Yet 
from the viewpoint of the people being managed, this symbol is 
deadly. The more comforting it is to the manager, the more it saps 
the lifeblood of the team. 

People require a sense of uniqueness to be at peace with 
themselves, and they need to be at peace with themselves to let the 
jelling process begin. When management acts to stifle uniqueness, 
uniqueness happens anyway. People simply express their uniqueness 
in uncontrolled dimensions. For example, employees who take 
a perverse pride in being difficult to manage or hard to motivate or 
unable to work with others may be reacting to too much control. 
They would almost certainly rather express themselves in some less 
difficult way, something that would not work to the detriment of the 
group's effectiveness.

What could be wrong with a team that is uniquely quality-
conscious or uniquely productive or uniquely competent to meet atough deadline? Nothing, you might think, yet even these nominally 


154 PEOPLEWARE 

acceptable forms of uniqueness are upsetting to lots of managers. 
They grumble that the teams are unmanageable and uppity. What's 
really threatened by the team's eliteness is not manageability, but the 
trappings of managerial strength. The team might be hellbent on 
success, but the manager is worried about being considered a wimp. 

If you could effect some change in the people you manage and 
make them much more productive and goal-directed but also less 
controllable, would you do it? The answer to this question distinguishes 
the great managers from the merely mediocre. The mediocre 
manager is too insecure to give up the trappings. The great 
manager knows that people can't be controlled in any meaningful 
sense anyway; the essence of successful management is to get 
everyone pulling in the same direction and then somehow get them 
fired up to the point that nothing, not even their manager, could stop 
their progress. 

A jelled team does have the effect of making people more productive 
and goal-directed. And you do give up some control, or at 
least the illusion of control, when it jells. The team begins to feel 
elite in some way or other, with all members of the team sharing in 
the sense of eliteness. The unique thing about the team doesn't have 
to be anything very fundamental. For example, there was one 
championship football defensive unit whose only unique characteristic 
was that all members of the team were "no-names." It was 
enough. They took pride in that fact and knit around it. Whatever 
the elite characteristic is, it forms the basis of the team's identity, 
and identityis anessentialingredient ofa jelledteam. 

An important qualifier here is that teams need to be unique in 
some sense, but not in all senses. There are lots of examples of 
teams that complied with institutional standards of appearance. Military 
specialty teams and most sports teams dress alike. But as long 
as they are allowed to feel unique in some sense, they can conform 
in others. 

Managers who feel threatened by elite teams often talk of the 
deleterious effect their eliteness can have on people outside the team. 
If members of one small working group begin to characterize themselves 
as Winners, isn't everyone else automatically put into the category 
Losers? It is true that extremely successful teams can be 
daunting to those outside the team. But this is not so much the 
effect of the team as of the success. If this is your only problem, 
you should be writing your own book. 


CHEMISTRY FOR TEAM FORMATION 155 

On Not Breaking Up the Yankees 

If a team does knit, don't break it up. At least give people the option 
to undertake another project together. They may choose to go their 
separate ways, but they ought to have the choice. When teams stay 
together from one project to the next, they start out each new 
endeavor with enormous momentum. 

A Network Model of Team Behavior 

This may offend your sensibilities as a manager, but managers are 
usually not part of the teams that they manage. Teams are made up 
of peers, equals that function as equals. The manager is most often 
outside the team, giving occasional direction from above and clearing 
away administrative and procedural obstacles. By definition, the 
manager is not a peer and so can't be part of the peer group. 

This idea is upsetting to managers who pride themselves on 
their leadership. Isn't the manager supposed to supply leadership, 
to function as quarterback, spiriting the team on to victory through 
judicious play selection and split-second timing? That may sound 
good, but the team that needs that much leadership isn't functioning 
very well as a team. On the best teams, different individuals provide 
occasional leadership, taking charge in areas where they have 
particular strengths. No one is the permanent leader, because that 
person would then cease to be a peer and the team interaction would 
begin to break down. 

The structure of a team is a network, not a hierarchy, For all 
the deference paid to the concept of leadership (a cult word in our 
industry), it just doesn't have much place here. 

Selections from a Chinese Menu 

In writing about teams, we have traded somewhat on the easy analogy 
between teams in industry and teams in sports. The very word 
team conjures up an image of healthy young folks sweatily pursuing 
footballs or hockey pucks or each other. It's hard to think about 
teams without reference to sports, but the sports analogy carries 
some unfortunate baggage. 

The typical team you see thrashing away on weekend television 
is made up of individuals with a lot in common: Members of 
a basketball team, for instance, may all be tall, young, strong, and 


156 PEOPLEWARE 

of the same sex. They're alike because the nature of their 
endeavor requires that they be alike. Them is less of a requirement 
for sameness on development project teams. But since our 
whole notion of teams is affected by the sports example, we often 
expect sameness on the team and perhaps unwittingly bring it 
about. 

A little bit of heterogeneity can be an enormous aid to create 
a jelled team. Add one handicapped developer to a newly formed 
work group, and the odds go up that the team will knit. The same 
effect can result from adding a co-op student or an ex-secretary 
on the first project after being retrained. Whatever the heterogeneous 
element is, it takes on symbolic importance to team 
members. It is a clear signal that it's okay not to be a clone, okay 
not to fit into the corporate mold of Uniform Plastic Person. 

The saddest example of the overly homogeneous work 
group is the all-male team. Women are obvious victims of the 
sports analogy: The same male establishment that excluded them 
systematically from team sports for so long now compounds the 
felony by insinuating that they're probably bad team players. Of 
course women function as well on teams as men. Any man who 
has worked on mixed teams would find it hard to imagine ever 
again working in the all-male environment. That was our fathers' 
sad lot. 

Putting It All Together 

You can't always make it happen, but when a team does come 
together, it's worth the cost. The work is fun, the people are energized. 
They roll over deadlines and milestones and look for 
more. They like themselves. They feel loyal to the team and to 
the environment that allows the team to exist. 


PART V
ITS SUPPOSED TO BE FUN
TO WORKHERE


Somewhere deep in our ancestral memory is buried the notion 
that work is supposed to be onerous. If you enjoy doing something, 
it isn't really work. If you enjoy it enough, it's probably sinful. 
You ought not to do it too much or even at all. You certainly 
shouldn't be paid for it. What you really ought to do is find something 
else to work at, something that feels like work. Then you can 
be bored, tired, and generally miserable like everybody else. 

If you're a manager, this vestigial memory requires you to 
make sure that your people never have any fun on the job. Any evidence 
of pleasure or joy in the workplace is a sure sign that some 
manager is not doing the job properly. Work is not being extracted 
with maximum efficiency from the workers, otherwise they 
wouldn't be having such a good time. 

Of course nobody ever says outright that work ought not to be 
fun, but the idea is there, burned into our cultural subconsciousness. 
It turns up in the guilty sheepishness we feel if we're ever caught 
giggling in delight at the task at hand. It surfaces in our reluctant 
acceptance of the dress code, the anti-popcorn code, and the general 
furrowed-brow attitude that distinguishes so-called professionals 
from people who are enjoying themselves. 

In this part we'll address the opposite premise, that work 
should be fun. 

157



Chapter 24
CHAOS AND ORDER


There is something about human nature that makes us the 
implacable enemies of chaos. Whenever we encounter chaos, we 
roll up our sleeves and go right to work to replace it with order, 
Man-made order is everywhere ... in the home, in the garden, in 
the way we comb our hair or organize our streets into neat grids. 
But it does not follow from this that we'd be happier if there were 
no more chaos. On the contrary, we'd be bored to tears. What 
chaos is left in modern society is a precious commodity. We have to 
be careful to conserve it and keep the greedy few from hogging 
more than their share. 

We managers tend to be the greedy few. We often see chaos 
as our particular domain. We assume that it's our job to clean it up, 
all of it. The Open Kimono manager has a different approach. He 
or she is willing to leave small packets of chaos to others. The 
manager's job in this approach is to break it up and parcel it out. 
The people down below get to have the real fun of putting things 
shipshape. 

Progress Is Our Most Important Problem 

The amount of chaos is ever declining. This is particularly evident 
in new technological fields. Those people who were attracted to 
such areas years ago by the newness, the lack of order, feel a 
nostalgic fondness for the days when everything wasn't so awfully 
mechanical. Every great advance of the past twenty years has had 

159



160 PEOPLEWARE 

the effect of reducing the craziness of our work. Of course those 
advances were wonderful—we'd never want to go back to the old 
days—but still... 

We're all eager to improve our methods and make the business 
of development a more orderly enterprise. That's progress. True, 
some of the crazy fun is lost in the process but one person's fun 
may be another's agony (that project you thought was such a lark 
probably gave your boss an ulcer). In any event, progress toward 
more orderly, controllable methods is an unstoppable trend. The 
thoughtful manager doesn't want to stop the trend, but may 
nonetheless feel a need to replace some of the lost disorder that has 
breathed so much energy into the work. This leads to a policy of 

constructive reintroduction of small amounts of disorder. 

Once the idea is stated so baldly, it's simple enough to compile 
a list of ways to implement this policy: 

pilot projects 
war games 
brainstorming 
provocative training experiences 
training, trips, conferences, celebrations, and retreats 

For this list, we've limited ourselves to disorder-reintroduction 
techniques that we have seen used successfully. Your own list 
ought not to be so limited. A short brainstorming session on the 
subject (more about brainstorming below) will produce wild and 
wonderful possibilities. 

Pilot Projects 

A pilot project is one in which you set the fat book of standards 
aside and try some new and unproved technique. The new technique 
will be unfamiliar initially, and so you can expect to be inefficient 
at the start in applying it. This is a cost of change. On the 
other side of the ledger is the improvement in productivity gained 
from using the new technique. Also on the plus side of the ledger is 
the Hawthorne Effect, the boost in energy and interest that infuses 
your people when they're doing something new and different. 

Are these two pluses likely to outweigh the minus caused by 
the learning curve? We'd be foolhardy to suggest that they always 
would. The nature of the change introduced matters a lot, as do the 
length of the project, the capability of the staff members, and the 


CHAOS AND ORDER 161 

extent to which people believe in the technique they're trying out. 
Our experience is that pilot projects, projects that try out any modified 
approach, tend toward higher-than-average net 
That means you're likely to spend less money on a given project if 
you choose to run it as a pilot project with some new technique. 


Should all projects therefore be pilot projects? Your organization 
would be in good company if it adopted that policy, sharing it 
with Fujitsu, parts of the Southern Company, and some divisions of 
IBM. In any event, it makes far more sense to run all projects as 
pilots than to run no projects as pilots. 

There are two likely objections to any expanded program of 
piloting new techniques: 

. Won't we run out of things to try out? 
. Won't we further complicate the downstream activities 
(product support, customer training, and so on) by delivering 
inconsistent products? 
The first objection makes sense only in the abstract. Most organizations, 
after decades of having a policy of testing new ideas rarely if 
ever, need not worry too much about running out of things to try. 
They could begin by trying all the good ideas they ignored during 
the 1960s, then moving on to the 1970s and 1980s. By the time 
they're through with all those, a decade will have passed and there 
will be plenty more to try out 

As to the problem of inconsistent products passed downstream, 
you may as well admit that this is true anyway in even the 
most standardized shop. What present-day standardization has 
achieved is a documentary consistency among products, but nothing 
approaching meaningful functional consistency. In other words, 
standardization has mainly homogenized the paperwork associated 
with the products, rather than the products themselves. If the paper 
trail left by the project were a little different from standard, the added 
inconvenience would be small. 

One caveat about pilot projects: Don't experiment with more 
than one aspect of development technology on any given project. 
For all the talk about the importance of standards, it's surprising 
how often managers abandon all standards on the rare project that is 
designated a pilot. They often try out new hardware, new software, 
new quality control procedures, matrix management, and new prototyping 
techniques, all on the same project. 




A sensible approach to pilot projects is that they each be allowed 
to tinker with one component of the process. In the healthiest 
environment, project personnel would understand that they are encouraged 
to experiment with some single new technique on each 
project, but nonetheless expected to respect standards in other areas. 

War Games 

From four years of running our Coding War Games, we have 
learned that the sometimes raucous, competitive, no-lose experience 
can be a delightful source of constructive disorder. Our games are 
tailored for the software community, but the concept can be applied 
to virtually any field. Whatever your work, it can be an enjoyable 
experience to try your hand at a set of tailored problems, and to be 
able to compare your performance to a statistical performance profile 
of your peers. (Of course, the experience is only enjoyable as long 
as the security and confidentiality guarantees described in Chapter 8 
are respected and you are thus assured that the game results won't 
be used against you.) 

War games help you to evaluate your relative strengths and 
weaknesses and help the organization to observe its global strengths 
and weaknesses. For these reasons, two of our client companies are 
now undertaking a program of annual war games, used by their employees 
to gauge improvements in their own skills over time. Once 
a year, they subject themselves to the confidential testing process, 
much as you would submit yourself to a physical exam. 

For the purpose of stimulating creative disorder, the most 
effective form of war game calls for participants to take part in 
teams. The following is one formula for such an exercise, a formula 
that we have tried out with some success (and enormous amusement): 


1. Select a small development project or well-defined task as a 
guinea pig. The best choice is an actual job from your organization, 
something that requires from one to two person-
months of effort. Pick a problem that has some novelty and 
challenge, but that nonetheless makes broad use of your people's 
typical working skills. 
2. Conduct the project in a normal fashion up through publication 
of a concrete statement of work. 

CHAOS AND ORDER 163 

3. Announce a 24-Hour Project Tournament to be conducted on 
an upcoming weekend. Make sure everybody understands 
that you're not saving money at the expense of their weekend, 
Explain that the tournament is run over a weekend so the teams 
can have the place to themselves, not so you can save on manpower 
cost. Encourage people to form teams of four each and 
compete on a totally voluntary basis. 
4. Distribute the statement of work in advance, along with a 
statement of rules and objectives. 
5. On the day of the Tournament, only participants are present. 
Supply everything they need (food, machines, cots, copiers, 
conference rooms, whatever). Have all of the teams undertake 
the same work in head-to-head competition with each other. 
6. Have facilitators available to enforce the ground rules, ready to 
head off fatal problems and to make lots of noise over every 
milestone attained. 
7. Look for opportunities to make everyone a winner in some 
sense (elapsed-time winners, robust-product winners, clever-
solution winners). Make a big fuss over any and all accomplishments. 
8. Install the winning product, or perhaps several winning products 
in parallel. Keep careful track over time of product 
stability, number of defects, level of user acceptance, cost to 
change, and whatever other parameters affect project success. 
Report meaningful data back to the teams. 
When you pull this off successfully, people will tell you they've had 
the most exciting and enjoyable experience of their entire careers; 
nothing less than that is your goal. Expect to achieve that goal, 
though it may take a few tries. 

Some tilings to keep in mind about experiences like the Project 
Tournament: First, these affairs cost money. Don't go into them 
hoping to gull your staff into building something on a Saturday that 
you would otherwise have to pay real wages for. Expect to spend 
several times more on a Project Tournament than you would on a 
conventional running of the same project. Second, invest a lot of 


164 PEOPLEWARE 

time in making the problem specification particularly solid, bringing 
your facilitators up to speed, and building in lots of milestones and 
checkpoints. Third, invest some effort to assure the project's scope 
is abouttherightsize forthe amount oftimeallocated (noonehas 
any fun if all the teams are defeated or if the tournament is finished 
an hour after it begins). Finally, look for opportunities to spend 
money generously on meals (in one tournament we ordered lovely 
picnic lunches catered by a New York City restaurant, had dinner 
delivered, and dragged everybody off to Chinatown for .2 a.m. 
snacks). 

Running the project through a whole night, for some reason, 
adds to the fun. People love an excuse to get tired together, to push 
back sleep and let their peers see them with their hair down, 
unshaved, rumpled, and grumpy, with no makeup or pretense. And 
it makes them feel more closely bound to each other: 

"During the event, I noticed [one of the participants] 

catching a catnap on the rug in the reception area. I'd 

known her for years before that and always thought her a 

bit stiff. But from that point on, I felt differently about 

her. I felt differently about all of them. We'd been 

through it together." 

—from a tournament post mortem 

Brainstorming 

Brainstorming is a structured interactive session, specifically targeted 
on creative insight. Up to half a dozen people get together to 
focus on a relevant problem. The rules of the session and the ploysused by the person in charge help to make it an enjoyable and disorderly 
experience, and often a truly rewarding one. 

There aren't many rules. Since you're trying to introduce 
chaos into the thought process, rules don't have much of a place. 
As facilitator, you want to impress on everyone to strive for quantity 
of ideas, not quality, and to keep the proceedings loose, even silly. 
Sometimes an apparently foolish idea, one that wouldn't even be 
mentioned in a more formal session, can turn out to be the prize. 
There is no evaluation of proposed ideas during the brainstorming. 
The evaluation phase comes later. Discourage negative comments, 
like "That's a dumb idea," since dumb ideas often lead others to 
think of smart ideas. 


CHAOS AND ORDER 165 

As facilitator, try these ploys to restart participants' thinking 
when the idea flow slows down: 

. analogy thinking (How does nature solve this or some 
similar problem?) 
. inversion (How might we achieve the opposite of our 
goal?) 
. immersion (How might you project yourself into the 
problem?) 
See the Notes for some good references on brainstorming. 

Training, Trips, Conferences, Celebrations, 
and Retreats 

Perhaps this is a sad comment on the dismal corporate workplace, 
but everybody relishes a chance to get out of the office. The chance 
that workers relish most is one combining travel with their peers and 
a one-of-a-kind experience. It might be going off together for a 
training session, particularly a provocative one, or taking in the 
International Conference on Whatever. All the better if the travel is 
to someplace romantic. You can send two people from Boston to a 
conference in London for about the same cost as sending them to a 
conference in St. Louis or Chula Vista. 

Particularly when a team is forming, it makes good business 
sense to fight for travel money to get team members out of the office 
together. If there is a remote client site, ship them off all expenses 
paid to check out that territory. When there is a thought-intensive 
deliverable due, put them into a conference center or hotel. Give 
them the chance to fly together, eat out together, and work out their 
roles in the new team. 

The Outward Bound schools make a thriving business of 
taking corporate groups into the wilderness and testing their mettle. 
Groups must make their way over Burma bridges and chutes, survive 
the waters of Penobscot Bay, or scale the face of Mount 
Katahdin. One day you're struggling with IDMS and the next 
you're hanging by your fingernails while a teammate belays you a 
line. Of course the experience isn't cheap. By the time you count 
the cost of the school, travel, and lost days, it comes to several 
thousand dollars per person. In most companies such an expense 
would be unthinkable. But what about the others, the ones who do 
invest in Outward Bound and the like? Are they missing something 


166 PEOPLEWARE 

that is obvious to all the reasonable folks in the world? Or are they 
pushing the envelope to bring out the best in their people? 

Is a few thousand dollars for a getaway experience too rich for 
your discretionary disorder budget? Maybe you could spring for 
forty dollars. One of the most innovative managers we know has a 
penchant for putting on unexpected lunches for his staff. He once 
went down to the city street and hired a hot dog vendor, complete 
with cart, sauerkraut, yellow mustard, and a blue and orange 
umbrella, to come up thirty floors and serve lunch to the team. The 
lunch was a nutritionist's nightmare but a sociologist's dream come 
true. Those who were there got high on good spirits and began to 
do bits and skits about their work, their managers, and each other. 
The noise level went up with their enthusiasm. It cost forty dollars 
and has been talked about ever since. Of course, that manager wrote 
it up as a business lunch, but it wasn't a lunch at all, it was a celebration. 


There can be no question that good sense and order are desirable 
components of our work day. There's also a place for adventure, 
silliness, and small amounts of constructive disorder. 


Chapter 25 

FREE ELECTRONS


In our parents' generation, work was usually structured 
rigidly within a corporate context You worked for a company, and 
you punched a clock or kept regular hours. You received a paycheck, 
same this week as last. Those above you in the hierarchy 
were treated with respect and deference: "Of course, sir, I'll get 
cracking on that right away, sir." It didn't seem like a life's work 
you were embarked upon—it seemed more like a job. But things 
have changed: ; 

One of my college roommates arranged a recent get-
together of members of our graduating class. Of the 
twenty people who showed up that night, only one 
turned out to have a "job" in the normal sense of that 
word. All the others were self-employed or free-lancing 
or contracting their services or working in some 
other nontraditional mode. 

—JDM 

The Cottage Industry Phenomenon 

It's hardly hot news these days that lots of our peers are working as 
cottage industry entrepreneurs. They contract their time by the day 
or week for programming or design work or sometimes management. 
There are even agencies that specialize in connecting these 
independents with organizations that need their talents. 

167 




Some of the most staid companies and institutions find 
themselves doing business with independents. Of course, they 
would often prefer to hire their own people rather than deal with 
the freelancers. But what can they do? It's a seller's market for 
expert services. They end up doing business with dozens of little 
organizations with names like William Alonzo & Associates 
(there are no associates, just Bill) or the Fat City Smarts 
Company. Some of the folks they have to work with are positively 
flaky: They want to work when they want to work, perhaps 
doing one project and then taking off two or three months to go 
skiing. Erghhh! How unprofessional. 

If you're a Captain of Industry, the cottage industry phenomenon 
can be more than a little upsetting. Not only are the entrepreneurs 
inclined to be uppity, they are a terrible example to your 
employees. They've got more freedom, more time off, more 
choice of work. They're having more fun. They often make more 
money. 

Fellows, Gurus, and Intrapreneurs 

Organizations are under increasing pressure to offer attractive inhouse 
alternatives to their best people lest they become part of the 
cottage industry phenomenon. One such alternative is a position 
with loosely stated responsibilities so that the individual has a 
strong say in defining the work. The charter might read, 
"Investigate new methods for the twenty-first century," or "Put 
together a new and exciting training sequence," or "Design an 
ideal work station complex for developers." 

In extreme cases, the charter is a blank check; if your 
corporation is fortunate enough to have a self-motivated superachiever 
on board, it's enough to say "Define your own job." Our 
colleague Steve McMenamin characterizes these workers as "free 
electrons," since they have a strong role in choosing their own 
orbits. 

The trend to create an increasing number of free electron 
positions is more than just a response to the threat of the cottage 
industry. The reason there are so many gurus and Fellows and 
intrapreneurs and internal consultants in healthy modern companies 
is quite simply that companies profit from them. The people 
in these positions contribute disproportionately to the organizations 
that employ them. They are motivated to make the positions 
created for them pay off for their companies. 


FREE ELECTRONS 169


Where I go and what I do are things pretty much defined 
by myself. Management recognized that the company 
needed someone looking into all the directions we 
weren't currently following, hence my unstructured 
charter. It puts me into the import business, constantly 
on the lookout for new ways the technology 
could help us. The position makes me more loyal to the 
company, but less loyal to my old profession of information 
science—a good idea is welcome wherever it 
comes from. I define my success based on the value it 
brings the company. It's almost as though the company 
were my own. There are lots of people who have 
someplace in their closets an intrapreneurial hat. 
You've just got to find out who they are and get them to 
wear it. 

—Michael L. Mushet 
Manager of Technology Research 
Southern California Edison 

I've had a number of different positions in my years 
with the company, but only one of them had existed 
before I cajne along. I've been able to define my position, 
to a large degree, ever since. There is always 
someone in an organization that's willing to sponsor 
meaningful work in a new area, at least up to a point. 
Where it works best, upper management has bought 
into a person, rather than into a concept. The person 
then defines and sells the concept. Everyone ought to 
have some responsibility for broad area goals, and 
some freedom to pursue them. 

—Richard Branton 
Manager, Data Administration Information Services 
Southern Company Services, Inc. 

It works when people are self-motivated, and when 
they let reality dictate their directions to some extent. 
I'm constantly being dragged back into reality because 
the interests of the company dictate it. A lot of pure 
research is dead end. It's important to keep yourself 


170 PEOPLEWARE 

focused on applied technology, because that can 
always be made useful to the organization. The whole 
idea of a loose charter can backfire, too, as it has at 
Xerox. Some of the best people there got to feel that 
the company was never going to use the good ideas 
they were coming up with [at PARC], and so they left. 

—Bill Bonham 
Sage Fellow, MicroSage Computer Systems, Inc. 

No Parental Guidance 

In Soviet society, particularly among Communist Party members, 
there was a pervasive system of life counseling. Virtually every 
member was assigned a counselor, someone to meet with on a 
weekly basis to help make life decisions, to iron out marriage and 
career problems, and to keep the political outlook in line. The 
counselor served in loco parentis. 

To Westerners, this all seems terribly intrusive. We feel that 
the individual needs to be left alone to work out such matters, or 
at least free to seek guidance if and when and from whomever he 
or she chooses. But much of this fine individualism evaporates in 
the workplace. There, we accept the wisdom that virtually everyone 
needs a firm direction, handed down from above. Most people 
do—they welcome a clear statement from the boss of just 
what specific targets are to be met in order to be considered a success. 
Most people need a well-defined charter, but managing the 
ones who don't is another matter. 

The mark of the best manager is an ability to single out the 
few key spirits who have the proper mix of perspective and maturity 
and then turn them loose. Such a manager knows that he or 
she really can't give direction to these natural free electrons. 
They have progressed to the point where their own direction is 
more unerringly in the best interest of the organization than any 
direction that might come down from above. It's time to get out 
of their way. 


Chapter 26
HOLGAR DANSK


We have put this book together as a series of essays on the 
various ways that companies and projects go wrong. If we're on 
target, you should have been able to see your own situation reflected 
in at least a few of the essays. Each chapter, even the gloomiest, 
has had some prescriptive advice, something that you could do to 
begin the sensible reconstruction of a project, a division, or a whole 
organization. Of course these prescriptions are inadequate, but they 
are a start. They encourage you to take on the Furniture Police, to 
fight corporate entropy, defeat teamicidal tendencies, put more quality 
into the product (even if time doesn't permit), repeal Parkinson's 
Law, loosen up formal Methodologies, raise your E-Factor, open 
your kimono, and do a host of other things. 

It doesn't take great prescience to see that one of these measures 
is all you're likely to pull off successfully. If you try more, 
you willjustdiffuse yourefforts. Therumpus you11raise will be 
more confusing than constructive, and your colleagues and those 
above you in the corporate hierarchy are likely to write you off as a 
whiner. One change is plenty. Even a single substantive change to 
the sociology of your organization will be a mammoth accomplishment. 


But Why Me? 

Making that single change is a tall order for one person. If you've 
got second thoughts about throwing yourself into the fray, it's only 

171



172 PEOPLEWARE 

natural. Who are you, after all, to confront the kind of power group 
that springs up around the new Methodology or around the space 
and services being planned for the new office? Are you really 
strong enough? 

Some years ago, there was a famous toreador who used the 
name El Cordobes. He was a charismatic fellow, and both his personal 
and professional lives were followed in the world press. In 
one interview, a reporter asked El Cordobes what regular exercises 
he did to stay fit enough for the ardors of bullfighting. 

"Exercises?" 

"Yes. You know, jogging or weight lifting to maintain 

your physical condition." 

"There is something you don't understand, my friend. I 

don't wrestle the bull." 

The key to success in fostering the kind of change we're advocating 
is that you not try to wrestle the bull. You're certainly not strong 
enough for that. 

A single person acting alone is not likely to effect any meaningful 
change. But there's no need to act alone. When something is 
terribly out of kilter (like too much noise in the workplace), it takesvery little to raise people's consciousness of it. Then it's no longer 
just you. It's everyone. 

The Sleeping Giant 

Just north of the Danish city of Copenhagen is the castle Kronborg. 
For the price of a few kroner, you can visit the castle casements and 
see there the reclining form of Holgar Dansk, the legendary sleeping 
giant of Denmark. He sleeps quietly while the country is at peace, 
but if ever Denmark should be in danger, Holgar will awake and 
then his wrath will be terrible to see. Whole classes of Danish 
school children tiptoe down to see his fourteen-foot recumbent 
form. His shield and sword are there beside him, his armor ready to 


HOLGARDANSK 173 

go. The children talk in whispers—nobody is too eager to see this 
giant in action, but they are happy he is on their side. 

There may be a sleeping giant inside your own organization, 
ready to awaken when it is in danger. It is in danger if there is too 
much entropy, too little common sense. The giant is the body of 
your co-workers and subordinates, rational men and women whose 
patience is nearly exhausted. Whether they are great organizational 
thinkers or not, they know Silly when they see it. And some of the 
things that do most harm to the environment and sociology of the 
workplace are downright silly. 

Waking Up Holgar 

It doesn't take much to wake up the giant. If the silliness is gross 
enough, people need no more than a gentle catalyst. It may be one 
small voice saying, "This is unacceptable." People know it's true. 
Once it's been said out loud, they can't ignore it any longer. 

That may seem idealistic, but if you do wake up a sleeping 
giant in your company, you won't be the first:

 . An entire department of a large government agency has 
stuffed its telephone bells with tissues. There is no loud 
ringing now—only the gentle purr of the bell (or is it the quiet 
voice of Holgar Dansk?). 
. A California computer company has had a rash of guerrilla 
attacks against the paging system in the programmer area. The 
wires keep getting cut. Because the programmers are seated in 
what used to be an assembly bay, the ceilings (and the paging 
system speakers) are sixteen feet up in the air. Who can even 
reach so high? Perhaps it was Holgar Dansk. 
. The manager of a large project in Minneapolis has refused to 
move his people to the new quarters. ("New" in this case just 
meant smaller and noisier.) Administrators were simply 
stunned at his refusal; they had never considered the possibility. 
Working people are supposed to do as they're told. The 
manager had a different theory, that working people are sup



posed to do work. He had assembled enough evidence about 
the new environment to convince himself that they couldn't do 
that in the new workplace. So the proper function of the manager 
was to say no. If he had been all alone in taking this 
stand, it would have been easy to overrule him. But he wasn't 
alone. He had Holgar Dansk on his side.

 . An Australian company doesn't form teams anymore but 
allows individuals to form their own. In that company, you 
join voluntarily with two of your colleagues and the company 
assigns the team as a unit. It might never have happened but 
for a little pressure from Holgar Dansk. 
If you've smiled ruefully at any of the characterizations in this 
book, it's time now to stop smiling and start taking corrective 
action. Sociology matters more than technology or even money. 
It's supposed to be productive, satisfying fun to work. If it isn't, 
then there's nothing else worth concentrating on. Choose your terrain 
carefully, assemble your facts, and speak up. You can make a 
difference .,. with a little help from Holgar Dansk. 


PART VI


SON OF PEOPLEWARE


For the second edition, we have chosen to add new chapters 
at the end rather than attempt a total revision. If the cohesion of 
Part VI has suffered—it contains a little of everything—at least 
the historical perspective of the original book has been preserved. 
The first five parts were written by two youngish middle-aged 
consultants who spent most of their time working at the project 
level; Part VI is written by two gnarled and grizzled old consultants 
who now spend appreciably more of their time working at 
organizational levels. The first five parts are—usually—concerned 
with the design of development projects and the environments 
where they may prosper; Part VI is concerned with the 
design of entire organizations that include development work. 

175



Chapter 27
TEAMICIDE REVISITED


The seven kinds of teamicide we described in Chapter 20 
seemed to us at the time to stretch all the way from the alpha to 
the omega of the subject. But there were two important kinds of 
teamicide that we missed. Like the original seven, these two 
additions are practiced widely in our field. One of them has 
become so ubiquitous that a small growth industry has sprung up 
to support it.... 

Those Damn Posters 

Pick up the airline magazine or on-board shoppers' catalog on 
your next flight and flip through the full-page advertisements. 
Somewhere in there you will come upon a colorful selection of 
inspirational posters and framed messages for display on corporate 
walls (lest someone use up the wall space with work products). 
Don't just glance at them, but force yourself to read 
through them all, turning over their texts in your mind and savoring 
their syrupy prose. If you're not angry by the time you're 
done, you may have been serving under lousy managers for much 
too much of your career. 

Most forms of teamicide do their damage by effectively 
demeaning the work, or demeaning the people who do it. Teams 
are catalyzed by a common sense that the work is important andthat doing it well is worthwhile. The word well in this last sentence 
is essential: The team assigns itself the task of setting and 

177



178 PEOPLEWARE 

upholding a standard of prideful workmanship. All team members 
understand that the quality of the work is important to the 
organization, but the team adopts fr still higher standard to distinguish 
itself. Without this distinguishing factor, the group is just a 
group, never a real team. 

Into this complicated mix, now imagine dropping a $150 
framed poster to advise people that "Quality Is Job One." Oh. 
Gee, we never would have thought that. No sir, we sort of 
assumed—until this wonderful poster came along—that Quality 
was Job Twenty-Nine, or maybe Eleventy-Seven, or maybe even 
lower than that on the corporate value scale, maybe someplace 
after reducing ear wax or sorting the trash. But now we know. 
Thanks. 

These motivational accessories, as they are called (including 
slogan coffee mugs, plaques, pins, key chains, and awards), 
are a triumph of form over substance. They seem to extol the 
importance of Quality, Leadership, Creativity, Teamwork, 
Loyalty, and a host of other organizational virtues. But they do so 
in such simplistic terms as to send an entirely different message: 
Management here believes that these virtues can be improved 
with posters rather than by hard work and managerial talent. 
Everyone quickly understands that the presence of the posters is a 
sure sign of the absence of hard work and talent. 

That important matters like these should be the subject of 
motivational posters is already an insult. But the implementation 
makes it even worse. Consider an example marketed by one 
company: It shows a soft-focus image of sweating oarsmen, rowing 
in perfect unison through the misty morning. Underneath it 
reads, in part: 

T.E.A.M.W.O.R.K 
. . . The Fuel That Allows Common People To Attain 
Uncommon Results 

The "common people" they're talking about here are you 
and your workmates. Common people. (Don't take it too hard.) 
At least they're consistent in attitude: The same company's 
Leadership poster tells us that "the speed of the leader determines 
the rate of the pack." The pack. Yep, that's you again. 

Motivational accessories are phony enough to make most 
people's skin crawl. They do harm in healthy organizations. The 
only place where they do no harm is where they are ignored—as 


TEAMICtDE REVISITED 179 

in companies where the harm was done long, long ago and people 
have ceased to register any further decline. 

Overtime: An Unanticipated Side Effect 

You may already have picked up a certain bias in the book's original 
chapters against the use of overtime. It has been our experience 
that the positive potential of working extra hours is far exaggerated, 
and that its negative impact is almost never considered. 
That negative impact can be substantial: error, burnout, accelerated 
turnover, and compensatory "undertime." In this section, we 
examine yet another negative effect of overtime: its teamicidal 
repercussions on otherwise healthy work groups. 

Imagine a project with a well-jelled team. You and your 
colleagues are producing good work at a rate that is frankly astonishing, 
even to you and your boss. You all understand this to be 
the beneficial effect of team jell, that the whole of your team production 
capacity is greater than the sum of your individual productivities. 
But it's still not enough. The powers that be have 
promised the product for June, and it's just not going to get done 
at the current rate. 

Sounds like a case for a little overtime, right? You move the 
team into high gear, add a few hours to the workweek (still at the 
same high production rate), maybe work a few Saturdays. There 
is only one problem: One of your teammates—let's call him 
Allen—just doesn't have the flexibility that the rest of you enjoy. 
He is a widower and thus the primary care-giver for his little boy. 
Allen has to show up at the day-care facility at 5:15 each afternoon 
to pick the child up. As you might imagine, his Saturdays 
and Sundays, the only real quality time with his son, are inviolable. 


Hey, that's okay, you think, we'll cover for Allen. We all 
understand. And you all do . . . in the beginning. 

A few months later, however, the rest of you are starting to 
show the strain. All your Saturdays have been gobbled up, as 
have most of your Sundays. You've been working sixty-plushour 
weeks for longer than you thought possible, and your spouses 
and kids are grumbling. Your laundry is piling up, your bills 
are unpaid, your vacation plans have been scrapped. Allen, 
through all this, is still working a forty-hour week. Finally, somebody 
says what you are all thinking: "I'm getting pretty sick of 
carrying Allen." 




What's happened here? A team that was positively humming 
with the good effects ofjell has been pried apart by an overtime 
policy that could not be applied uniformly to the team members. 
But the members of good teams are never uniform in any 
respect, certainly not in their abilities to "borrow" time from their 
personal lives. In almost any team of four or five or six people, 
there are bound to be a few who can't be expected to put in the 
kind of overtime that might fit pretty well into some of the others' 
lives. All that can be shrugged off as unimportant if the overtime 
is only a matter of a few long evenings and maybe one extra 
weekend day. But if the overtime drags on over months and starts 
to exact a real toll on even the most willing team members, there 
is bound to be damage to team cohesion. The people who aren't 
sharing the pain will become, little by little, estranged from the 
others. And the team magic will be gone. 

Extended overtime is a productivity-reduction technique, 
anyway. The extra hours are almost always more than offset by 
the negative side effects. This is true even if you don't consider 
the disruption of the team. When you take into account the way 
that the team members' differing abilities to work overtime tends 
to destroy teams, the case against it becomes persuasive. 

Most managers have at least a suspicion that overtime doesn't 
help, that projects that work a lot of overtime are not much of a 
credit to their managers' skills and talents. But they end up allowing 
or encouraging overtime, anyway. Why is this? Jerry 
Weinberg has an answer of sorts: He suggests that we don't work 
overtime so much to get the work done on time as to shield ourselves 
from blame when the work inevitably doesn't get done on 
tune. 


Chapter28
COMPETITION


The issue of competition within a team or work group is a 
complicated one, something that managers tend to disagree about. 
You've surely heard the line that companies exist to compete with 
each other, so by extension, a little competition within the company 
is a healthy way to keep the competitive edge. Other managers 
conclude that something is wrong when team members feel 
they are being pitted against each other. At the extreme, at least, 
competition is certain to inhibit team jell. If team members are 
told, for example, that only the best one of them will be around 
next year, you can be sure that they will not succeed in working 
together very well. 

Consider an Analogy 

Like managers, parents sometimes have to grapple with the issue 
of internal competition. They may find that their children tend to 
be competitive with each other. They may also try to reassure 
themselves that the competitive edge will be useful in the rough 
and tumble of later life, so perhaps honing that competitive edge 
within the family is okay. 

But competition between siblings is not entirely okay. We 
know, for example, that highly competitive siblings grow up to be 
distanced from each other, while those who are less competitive 
as children have at least a chance of building warm sibling friend


181



182 PEOPLEWARE 

ships as adults. Chances are that you know of at least one example 
of siblings who "don't speak" as adults, or the saddest 
extreme, entire families in which no two adjacent siblings have 
maintained a relationship into adulthood. 

There is now a substantial consensus about the ways that 
parents encourage or discourage sibling competition. Competition 
is fostered when the children are emotionally undernourished by 
the parents, when there just isn't enough time, respect, attention, 
and affection to go around. 

Conversely, when adult and young adult siblings are super-
supportive of each other, when they obviously care a lot about 
each other and take evident pleasure in their friendship, you know 
that their parents have done something right. 

Is it possible that internal competition in work teams is fostered 
by a manager's lack of time, respect, attention, and affection 
for his or her people? Though that may be too simplistic, we 
believe there is an important kernel of truth to the idea. 

Does It Matter? The Importance of Coaching 

What is the long-term effect of heightened competition among 
people who need to work together? One of the first victims is the 
easy, effective peer-coaching that is ubiquitous in healthy teams. 

As a manager, you may have convinced yourself that you 
ought to be the principal coach to the team or teams that report to 
you. That certainly was a common model in the past, when high-
tech bosses tended to be proven experts in the technologies their 
workers needed to master. Today, however, the typical team of 
knowledge-workers has a mix of skills, only some of which the 
boss has mastered. The boss usually coaches only some of the 
team members. What of the others? We are increasingly convinced 
that the team members themselves provide most of the 
coaching. 

When you observe a well-knit team in action, you'll see a 
basic hygienic act of peer-coaching that is going on all the time. 
Team members sit down in pairs to transfer knowledge. When 
this happens, there is always one learner and one teacher. Their 
roles tend to switch back and forth over time with, perhaps, A 
coaching B about TCP/IP and then B coaching A about implementation 
of queues. When it works well, the participants are 
barely even aware of it. They may not even identify it as coaching; 
to them it may just seem like work. 


COMPETITION 183 

Whether it is named or not, coaching is an important factor 
in successful team interaction. It provides coordination as well as 
personal growth to the participants. It also feels good. We tend 
to look back on significant coaching we've received as a near 
religious experience. We feel a huge debt to those who have 
coached us in the past, a debt that we cheerfully discharge by 
coaching others. 

The act of coaching simply cannot take place if people don't 
feel safe. In a suitably competitive atmosphere, you would be 
crazy to let anyone see you sitting down to be coached; it would 
be a clear indication that you knew less than your coach about 
some subject matter. You would be similarly crazy to coach 
someone else, as that person may eventually use your assistance 
to pass you by. 

Teamicide Re-revisited 

Internal competition has the direct effect of making coaching difficult 
or impossible. Since coaching is essential to the workings 
of a healthy team, anything the manager does to increase competition 
within a team has to be viewed as teamicidal. Here are 
some of the managerial actions that tend to produce teamicidal 
side effects: 

. annual salary or merit reviews 
. management by objectives (MBO) 
. praise of certain workers for extraordinary accomplishment 
. awards, prizes, bonuses tied to performance 
. performance measurement in almost any form 
But hold on here, aren't these the very things that managers spend 
much or even most of their time doing? Sadly, yes. And yet 
these actions are likely to be teamicidal. 

In his 1982 book Out of the Crisis, W. Edwards Deming set 
forth his now widely followed "Fourteen Points." Hidden among 
them, almost as an afterthought, is point 12B: 

Remove barriers that rob people in management and in 
engineering of their right to pride of workmanship. This 
means [among other things] abolishment of the annual 
or merit rating and of management by objectives. 




Even people who think of themselves as Deming-ites have 
trouble with this one. They are left gasping, What the hell are we 
supposed to do instead? 

Deming's point is that MBO and its ilk are managerial cop-
outs. By using simplistic extrinsic motivators to goad performance, 
managers excuse themselves from harder matters such as 
investment, direct personal motivation, thoughtful team-formation, 
staff retention, and ongoing analysis and redesign of work 
procedures. 

Our point here is somewhat more limited: Any action that 
rewards team members differentially is likely to foster competition. 
Managers need to take steps to decrease or counteract this 
effect. 

Mixing Metaphors 

We interrupt this message for ... 

A STARTLING CONFESSION FROM THE AUTHORS 

Throughout this book, we have used and discussed the sports 
team as a metaphor for a well-jelled technical work group; we are 
now obliged to emphasize here our growing disenchantment with 
this metaphor. 

Most troubling to us these days is what the sports team 
metaphor implies about competition. Football teams and soccer 
teams and baseball teams compete within their leagues, but they 
also promote a good deal of internal competition. Those players 
who "ride the pines," for example, must feel just the littlest bit 
competitive toward the first string. Oh sure, they are rooting for 
them to win, of course, but perhaps not to look too great in the 
process. 

In high school, I was the shortest member of our varsity 
basketball team. I still remember the guy who had to 
foul out before I would be put in. His name was Doug 
Timmerman. He was the most damnably gifted player; 
he almost never fouled anybody. I loved him like a 
brother, but still.. . 

—TDM 


COMPETITION 185 

We have all seen sports teams that succeeded in spite of the 
failure of one of the individuals. We have also seen individual 
team members have a great night while their team was losing 
badly. The success or failure of the individual is thus disconnected 
from the success or failure of the group as a whole. This is an 
imperfect situation, one that only exacerbates any incipient tendency 
toward competition. 

By contrast, as an example, a choir or glee club makes an 
almost perfect linkage between the success or failure of the individual 
and that of the group. (You'll never have people congratulate 
you on singing your part perfectly while the choir as a whole 
sings off-key.) 

So, belatedly, we need to tell you that the musical ensemble 
would have been a happier metaphor for what we are trying to do 
in well-jelled work groups. We're not the only ones, of course, to 
use the term "team" to describe such a group. 

Whether you call it a "team" or an "ensemble" or a "harmonious 
work group" is not what matters; what matters is helping all 
parties understand that the success of the individual is tied irrevocably 
to the success of the whole. 


Chapter 29 

PROCESS IMPROVEMENT
PROGRAMS


Those wonderful folks who brought us Big-M Methodology 
back in the 1980s have not been idle. Their latest offering, the 
Process Improvement Movement, is newer, bigger, better, glitzier, 
and more ambitious . . . but it's also the same old stuff. Your 
local Process Improvement Program is Big-M Methodology, 
reborn. This time, it takes "one size fits all" to the extreme: not 
just one-size-fits-all at your company, but one-size-fits-all worldwide. 
Your organization's capability is measured against a fixed 
model. The more exactly you match the model, the higher the 
score you get. Higher scores are better. The highest score is the 
best. If all organizations got the highest score, they would all be 
the best, and, coincidentally, they would all be going about their 
work exactly the same way, the best way. Best is best, whether 
you're building PERL applets at Yahoo or pension accounting 
routines at Aetna. Well, that's the theory.... 

A Short History 

Just in case you've spent the last fifteen years on some other planet, 
we offer the following chronology of process improvement: 

1984: U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) forms Software 
Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University, 

186 


PROCESS IMPROVEMENT PROGRAMS 187 

and charters it to "establish standards of excellence for 
software engineering." 
1987: First five-level scheme for assessing "software maturity3' 
published by the SEI. 

1988: Publication of Watts Humphrey's instrumental paper, 
"Characterizing the Software Process: A Maturity 
Framework," in IEEE Software, March 1988. First assessments 
carried out and publicized. First public awareness 
of the Capability Maturity ModelsM (CMM). 

1989: Formation of process groups, and first process support 
organizations. Publication of Humphrey's Managing the 
Software Process. 

1990s: Proliferation of CMM in the U.S. DoD community and 
eventually beyond. Establishment of CMM target levels 
at many if not most large software organizations. 

At the heart of the CMM is an ordered set of Key Process 
Areas (KPAs), each characterized by skills defined as progressively 
more and more essential. Based on proficiency in Key 
Process Area skills, the rankings are divided into five levels of 
organizational "maturity." Attainment of each level is determined 
not just by the number of skills mastered but by the order in 
which they are mastered (for example, there is no credit for mastering 
Level 4 skills unless the organization has already attained 
Level 3). 

The Paradox of Process Improvement 

Standards are good. Thank heavens for standards, for without 
them you wouldn't be able to put a Kodak film cartridge into your 
Minolta camera; the plug of your coffeemaker wouldn't fit the 
socket on the wall; the signal broadcast by your local radio station 
would be incomprehensible to your radio; your new phone would 
be incompatible with your telephone service; CDs wouldn't go 
into your player; faxes would be garbled; clothing and shoe sizes 
would make no sense; new tires wouldn't fit old cars; and the 
Internet would only be accessible to the people who invented it. 

Such standards are good, but it's worth pointing out that the 
great triumph of standards in the modern world is almost entirely 
the success of standard interfaces. A standard for a screw thread 
or a AA battery or a tape cassette says a lot about the final prod



188 PEOPLEWARE 

uct—how it interfaces with its corresponding parts—but nothing 
about the process for building that product. It would still be a AA 
battery whether you built it underwater or using robots or trained 
monkeys, provided that it lived up to its end of the standard interface 
bargain (with its size, shape, tolerances, electrical characteristics, 
and so on). To extrapolate from the success of interface 
standards to the need for process standards is a bit of a stretch. 

Still, there is enormous appeal in the identification of an 
ideal process. The work of Humphrey, Palk, and others at the SEI 
is thoughtful, competent, ambitious, and sincere: 

When Tim and I edited the collection called Software 
State-of-the-Art: Selected Papers [Dorset House, 
1990], we set out to pick the most influential papers of 
the 1980s. "Characterizing the Software Process," by 
Watts Humphrey, was among the first that we chose. 
In an article that I wrote for American Programmer later 
that year, I committed myself as to which of the thirty-
one papers was the very best. Without hesitation, I 
chose Humphrey's. The impact of Humphrey's work in 
the years that followed has, I think, confirmed this 
selection. 

—TDM 

Identifying an ideal practice, or at least a candidate ideal 
practice, is a useful endeavor. But the programs that mandate 
such a practice are something else entirely. 

The paradox of the CMM is that process improvement is 
good, but process improvement programs aren't, or at least they 
often aren't. Competent people are involved in process improvement 
all the time: They take pride in progress and growth, and 
these can only come from getting more proficient at what they do. 
This kind of low-level process refinement is the basic hygiene of 
knowledge work, but formal process improvement moves responsibility 
up from the individual to the organization. The individual 
may strive for, practice, and/or promote good skills, but the organization 
can only institutionalize them. It is in this institutionalization 
that the danger lies. 

To understand the problem with the institutional approach to 
process improvement, you have to take your eye off the projects 
that get done while the process level is being lifted, and focus 
instead on the ones that aren't getting done. 


PROCESS IMPROVEMENT PROGRAMS 189 

It'sAbout theBenefit, Stupid 

Organizations that build products with the most value to their customers 
win. Those that build products that make the world yawn 
lose, even though they build them very, very efficiently. Even 
those who stumble while building products of high value win 
over the efficient yawners. Process isn't worth a rip unless it's 
applied to projects that are worth doing. 

/ gave a talk to a local professional society about the 
conflict of benefit and process. After it was over, a 
software manager told me about a project that had finished 
earlier that year. They had added several new 
transactions to an on-line customer inquiry and order 
system. At installation, they put in visit counters to find 
out how often the new features were used. After six 
months, they downloaded the counters. The manager 
knew how much it had cost his company to build the 
software, and he divided the visit count into the cost to 
arrive at a cost-per-transaction figure for the six 
months. The cost-per-transaction was $53,000! The 
benefit of each visit was probably measured in pennies. 
The great irony was that this was a CMM Level 2 organization, 
slated to be assessed for Level 3 within a few 
months. Gee, if they had only been a Level 3 organization 
before this project started, they could probably 
have gotten that cost down to $45,000 per transaction. 

_TRL 

When process improvement (as in "Level 3 by the end of 
the year!") becomes the goal, the scary projects get put onto the 
back burner. It's those scary projects, unfortunately, that are 
probably the ones worth doing. 

All the projects that carry real benefit carry real risks along 
with them. It is the project that has some novelty, some innovation 
or invention, that might grab the customer's imagination and 
wallet. It's even possible your company's most famous disaster 
project—the one that came in a year over schedule, at 3.5 times 
the cost, had loads of problems getting through system test, and 
still needs engineers standing around with code defibrillators just 


190 PEOPLEWARE 

to keep it running—is still the best project your organization has 
done in years. 

One of the strongest justifications for the CMM is that it 
will raise quality and productivity while decreasing risk: 

Level Key Process Key Actions Results 


Statistical Evidence of Process Measure/
Effectiveness Software Control Office 

Optimising Continuous Process Improvement Focus Measure Process Change Improve 
Rigorous Defect Causa) Analysis and Defect Prevention Process 
Oafect Prevention 

Product! vit 

Productivity and Quality are Measured Software Control Office
4 Process Operates within Acceptable Limit: [Meet Management& Quality
Managed Predictable Process and Product Quality Process iteasurement/Analysis


Documented Managerial/Engineering Software Control Office 

3 Process Integrated S/W Management
Organisational Software Process Focus biter-group Co-ordination


Defined Project Activities Under Control, Quality Education Program

Tracked 


. Disciplined Management Control Prcces.Software Control Office 
Project Management Policies/Procedures 
Project Estimating/Control 
Subcontractor Management 

Repeatable . Project Activities Under Control, Duality Tender Evaluation/Control 

Tracked 

Education Program 

Quantify/

Absence of Sound Management Practices Education Program 1 Software Process is Ad Hoc, Unstable Pfocenn nf03stjtemeftt Reduce 
Initial Software Development Results are Project Control/Planning RISK 
Unpredictable 

Figure 29.1. The SEI Capability Maturity Model. 

The chart suggests that the same work can be undertaken at 
higher levels with lower risk. But there is another interpretation 
that strikes us as more likely: Organizations become more and 
more averse to risk as they "mature." An organization under the 
gun to demonstrate increased CMM level is not going to go looking 
for real challenge. 

While we're at it, higher proficiency is unlikely to reduce 
risk anyway. . . . 

A New Indoor/Outdoor World Record 

Let's say you work for a medium-size company that builds 
shrink-wrapped business software. The officers of the corporation 
believe that the CMM does not come from Pittsburgh, but 
from God's own lips. They have brought in the SEI to assess the 
company's maturity level. The assessment is complete, and you 
are all gathered in the corporate auditorium where the SEFs Head 


jAt* -f .. 

PROCESS IMPROVEMENT PROGRAMS 191 

Assessor steps up to the podium to announce the findings. There 
is a hush in the hall.... 

"Ladies and gentlemen, we have some remarkable 
news. We have completed our assessment, and determined 
your CMM level on the five-level scheme. The 
result is that this organization has proved itself to be... 
Level 6! That's right, Level 6. We didn't even know 
there was a Level 6 until we came here. This is a 
remarkable day for all of us. We feel as if we have 
found a new element for the periodic table. You are the 
finest software development organization now known 
to mankind. Thank you. Have a nice day." 

Good news, huh? Now, what are you going to do with it? 
The more strongly you believe in the meaningfulness of the 
assessment, the more inclined you are to take on ever more difficult 
work. Raise the bar. You might as well put your people to 
work on software that other, lesser organizations couldn't possibly 
build. If you are the finest software development organization 
now known to mankind, it makes no sense at all to give your people 
the same work that any average palooka could do. Much better 
to torture your competition by taking on only great challenges. 
And if you fail now and again, so what? Sometimes you will succeed, 
and then you'll know you have a product worthy of a Level 
6 organization. If some run-of-the-mill work has to be done, you 
might as well send it off-shore. There are plenty of merely competent 
organizations to take on the easy ones. 

Raising the bar means that risk will increase. The more proficient 
you are, the more risk you take on. You'd be crazy not to. 

The more you improve the way you go about your work, the 
harder the work will be. This happens for two reasons: First, by 
improving our methods, we typically move the more mundane 
work either into the machine (for example, software now generates 
SQL statements; people used to do that job) or out of the 
project entirely (for example, the invention of the spreadsheet 
moved a huge pile of work out of the software development group 
and into the business lines). The work that remains is more intellectually 
dense; it takes greater skill and experience to do it. As 
we make real progress in process improvement, we need more talented 
and more experienced people to do the work. 


192 PEOPLEWARE 

The second reason is that improved methods allow you to 
take on more difficult challenges. And you will take them on ... 
unless you've been turned to the dark side.... 

Process Improvement: Is It Turning .Us to the Dark Side? 

[Note to reader: Read this section aloud in your best Darth Vader 
voice.] 

"Luke, look into your heart. You know the great 

financial gain that can be yours if you can reach Level 

4. (Remember, only the Emperor is allowed to be at 
Level 5.) Let nothing stand in your way, Luke. Turn 
to the Dark Side. . . . Here is our plan: We will undertake 
only projects that are clones of past efforts. We 
will work on only what we know we are good at. We 
will define a process that works beautifully for these 
vanilla situations. We will document everything that 
moves. When the Pan-Galactic Process Police arrive, 
they will be completely seduced by our seamless 
implementation of a perfectly managed software 
process. You will attain that promised massive bonus 
for software process improvement, but then you must 
act quickly. Cash that bonus check before your organization 
goes right down the tubes." [Evil laugh.] 
Organizations everywhere are under pressure to climb the 
CMM. In the extreme, they are hell-bent for Current Level+1 by 
tomorrow, or else. This is the Dark Side, for it entices the play-itsafe 
behavior of low-risk, and therefore low-benefit, projects. 

The Great Process Improvement Contradiction 

You need as much proficiency as you can possibly build into your 
organization. You need that in order to take on ever-more risky 
projects. The Key Process Areas, as identified by the SEI, will be 
useful to you in building proficiency; they define sets of skills 
that ought to be on any good software manager's wish list. Focus 
on the KPA skills, but do whatever you can to turn off the institutional 
score-keeping. 


PROCESS IMPROVEMENT PROGRAMS 193 

If you are already a CMM Level 2 or higher organization, 
rememberthis: 

The projectsmostworthdoing are the ones that will 
moveyou DOWN one fulllevel onyour process scale 

Maybe those are the only ones you can afford to do. 


Chapter 30 

MAKING CHANGE POSSIBLE


People hate change . . .
and that's because people hate change. . . .
I want to be sure that you get my point.
People really hate change.
They really, really do.


—Steve McMenamin 
The Atlantic Systems Guild 
London (1996) 

Steve's quote is taken from a presentation to an audience of 
IT managers who were more than a little troubled by his view. At 
first, they were pretty comfortable with rejecting it: "Hey, we 
build systems that change how people work and play. We try 
hard to make sure that the changes will be for the better. We 
explain how the new way will be better; sometimes, we even use 
precise geometric logic. Why would any rational person resist 
any change for the better?" To the protesters, Steve retorted, 
"You don't get it. I'm sorry, but people really, truly hate change. 
That's the problem: They're not rejecting a particular change on 
its merits; they're rejecting any change. And that's because people 
hate change." The examples he offered were devastating. 
Little by little the message got through, and the crisis counselors 
had to be called in. 

We need to talk about change because it is our business. 
More than being just system builders, we are change agents. 

194



" "" . MAKING CHANGE POSSIBLE 195 

Every time we deliver a new system, we ar& forcing people to 
change the way they do their work; we might be redefining their 
jobs entirely. We are demanding that they change, and while 
we're at it, our own organizations are demanding that we change, 
too. The emerging technologies and the building cycle-time pressures 
are forcing us to change how we build our products. 

And Now, a Few Words from Another Famous 
Consultant 

And it should be considered that nothing is more difficult 
to handle, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous 
to manage, than to put oneself at the head of 
introducing new orders. For the introducer has all 
those who benefit from the old orders as enemies, and 
he has lukewarm defenders in all those who might benefit 
from the new orders. 

—Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince (1513) 

We tend to think of Machiavelli as a cynic, but he almost 
certainly fancied himself a realist. He didn't set out to cast 
mankind in the most unflattering light, only to state the bald truth 
as he saw it. He wrote The Prince as a primer for the young 
Lorenzo de' Medici, who was ascending to govern the city-state 
of Florence. (The de' Medici family built an enclosed elevated 
walkway over the Arno, connecting their castle with the government 
building, to minimize the chances for assassination. Look 
for the walkway when you visit Florence; it's still there.) The 
book's purpose was to acquaint the young prince with reality, 
however pleasant or un-. 

"For the introducer has all those who benefit from the old 
orders as enemies, and he has lukewarm defenders in all those who 
might benefit from the new orders." Notice the equation is unbalanced 
against change. While you risk making enemies of those 
who have mastered the old ways—you are forcing them back to 
the uncomfortable position of novice—you receive only minor 
support from those who would gain. Why is that? Why are those 
who stand most to gain from the change still half-hearted in their 
support? That's because people hate change. When we start out 
to change, it is never certain that we will succeed. And the uncertainty 
is more compelling than the potential for gain. 


196 PEOPLEWARE 

In 1991, 1992, and 1993, I was the Chair of the 
National Software Methods Conference, held each 
spring in Florida. The first year, I made some opening 
remarks and handed out a questionnaire for all the participants 
to complete. I asked all sorts of questions 
about what methods and tools they used to build software. 
One question I asked was, "What method or tool 
has been seriously introduced in your organization but 
has failed to become common practice?" I collected 
the responses, to report the results back to the attendees 
by the close of the conference. I started making 
a list of failed methods and tools, but stopped when I 
noticed something much simpler and clearer: 
Everything had failed, at least somewhere. The real 
irony is that when I did report back, I took the list of 
failures and asked if anybody was using those methods 
or tools regularly. I got a positive response on every 
single one. Everything works, and everything fails. 
What is going on here? 

—TRL 

That's a Swell Idea, Boss. Pll Get Right On It. 

Whenever you attempt to instigate a change, you can expect a 
variety of responses. Jerry Johnson, of the Menninger Business 
Institute, has proposed that there is a pattern to this variety, something 
he calls the "Resistance-to-Change Continuum." It looks 
like this: 

1. Blindly Loyal (Ask no questions) 
2. Believers but Questioners 
a. Skeptics ("Show me.") increasing 
b. Passive Observers ("What's in it for me?") resistance 
c. Opposed (Fear of Change) 
d. Opposed (Fear of Loss of Power) 
3. Militantly Opposed (Will Undermine and Destroy) 
Figure 30.1. Resistance-to-Change Continuum. 

Everyone falls someplace on the continuum in the way he or she 
will respond to a change. 


MAKING CHANGE POSSIBLE 197 

Looking at the continuum, ask yourself, Who of these are 
my potential enemies, and who are my possible supporters? 
Clearly, the Militantly Opposed are dangerous; they will seek to 
return to the old status quo at any cost. You might conclude that 
the Blindly Loyal are good guys and the others are whiners, that 
the Blindly Loyal are allies and the other groups are enemies. 

Jerry pointed out that this view is all wrong. For example, 
we need to be aware of the danger posed by the Blindly Loyal. 
They are probably fairly powerless, and they will jump onto 
whatever appears hot. They follow le fad du jour: "We gotta 
stop the accounting package installation right now because we 
can do it better ourselves with an Intranet-based system using 
Java Decaf. Wait. Hold the Decaf. I just saw an ad on the 
Computing This Nanosecond website for Double-Java latte with 
foamy applets." They will withdraw their support as quickly as 
they give it in order to hop on some new bandwagon. 

Johnson asserts that the Believers but Questioners are the 
only meaningful potential allies of any change. The two 
extremes, Blindly Loyal and Militantly Opposed, are the real enemies. 
The success of your change will depend on how you manage 
the Believers but Questioners. Don't count on logic, by the 
way, as your trump card: These on-the-fence, maybe-baby allies 
are never going to be swayed solely by a rational discussion of 
why the proposed new way will be so much better than the current 
situation. Here is something to repeat to yourself whenever 
you set out to ask people to change: 

MANTRA: The fundamental response to change is not 
logical, but emotional. 

As systems developers, we have selected ourselves into the 
world of cool, calming, rational thought. Either our code compiles, 
or it doesn't. The compiler is never happy for us, nor mad 
at us. Perhaps this is why we tend to apply logic as our main 
device for resolving disputes. 

You may catch yourself patiently explaining to your kid: "I 
know you want a bike, but it is neither your birthday nor is it 
Christmas, the cultural dates upon which gifts may reasonably be 
expected. If you have accumulated sufficient allowance, you may 
proceed with the purchase yourself." And you may be frustrated 
by a not-very-logical response like, "But I want a bike! I want it 
right now." 




When we argue logically for change, one tactic is to contrast 
how the new world will be (good) compared to the current situation 
(bad). But think: Who helped implement the current situation? 
Who are the masters of the ways that we currently work? 
Could these people possibly take offense at any diminution of the 
current mode? Damn right they could. William Bridges, in 
Managing Transitions, suggests that we never demean our old 
ways. Instead, we need to celebrate the old as a way to help 
change happen. For example, 

"Folks, the CGS Close-in Guidance System has been 
running for 14 years. We estimate that it has perfectly 
handled over 1,000,000 take-offs and landings. The 
hardware platform has become technically obsolete, 
and there is some new remote sensing technology that 
we can take advantage of. Now we have the chance to 
redesign and rebuild the entire system. We need you 
and your expertise gained over these years of successful 
CGS experience to help us succeed in this effort." 

In general, it may help to remind people that any improvement 
involves change: 

You never improve if you can't change at all. 

—Tom DeMarco(1997) 

A Better Model of Change 

Here is the way most of us tend to think about change: 


NEW 
A Better Way 

STATUS 
QUO 

Figure 30.2. Naive model of how change happens. 

In this (naive) view, an idea, a simple vision of "a better way" to 
do things, effects a direct change from the old to the new. "We 
were perking along in the old mode when Harvey had a sudden 


MAKING CHANGE POSSIBLE 199 

inspiration, and we switched over to a new and altogether superior 
way of doing business." Honestly, it can't be that simple. It isn't. 
Contrast that naive model of change with the way an expert 
in family therapy, the late Virginia Satir, looked at change: 

PRACTICE 
& 
INTEGRATION 
Foreign Transforming
Element Idea


Figure 30.3. Satir Change Model. 

Change involves at least these four stages, never fewer. There is 
no chance of effecting meaningful change without going through 
the two intermediate stages. 

According to Satir's model, change happens upon the introduction 
of a foreign element: a catalyst for change. Without a 
catalyst, there is no recognition of the desirability of change. The 
foreign element can be an outside force or it can be the recognition 
that your world has somehow changed. 

Outside force: Watts Humphrey walks into your office 

and announces that you are a Level 0 shop. Hmmmm. 

or 

The world changes: The quarterly sales of your flag


ship product drop for the very first time in its history. 

Owww. 

When you try to institute change, the first thing you hit is 
Chaos. You've been there before. It's when you are convinced 
that you are worse off than before with this new tool, new procedure, 
or new technique. People are saying things like, "If we just 
jettison this new stuff, maybe we'll get back on schedule. . . ." 
You are suffering from the dip in the learning curve, and the 
assessment that the change is the problem may well be right, at 
least for the moment. You are worse off, for now. This is part of 


200 PEOPLEWARE 

the reason why response to change is so emotional. It is frustrating 
and embarrassing to abandon approaches and methods you 
have long since mastered, only to become a novice again. 
Nobody enjoys that sense of floundering; you just know you 
would be better off with the old way. Unfortunately, this passage 
through Chaos is absolutely necessary, and it can't be shortcut. 

The transforming idea is something that people in Chaos 
can grab onto as offering hope that the end of the suffering is 
near. A structured huddle is sometimes the best medicine: "I 
think that we're getting the hang of C++ coding, but how about a 
daily meeting at four o'clock for all of us to go over our class definitions 
together?" 

The Practice & Integration phase occurs on the upswing of 
the learning curve. You are not yet completely comfortable, as 
you are not yet proficient at the new, but you perceive that the 
new is now beginning to pay off or at least to show promise. 

You have reached the New Status Quo when what you 
changed to becomes what you do. An interesting characteristic of 
human emotion is that the more painful the Chaos, the greater the 
perceived value of the New Status Quo—if you can get there. 

The reason the Satir model is so important is that it alerts us 
that Chaos is an integral part of change. With the more naive 
two-stage model, we don't expect chaos. When it occurs, we 
mistake it for the new status quo. And since the new status quo 
seems so chaotic, we think, "Whoops, looks like we blew it; let's 
change back." The change-back message is bound to be heard 
loud and clear in the middle of any ambitious change. When 
you're looking for it, your chances of dealing sensibly with it are 
much improved. 

Safety First 

Change won't even get started unless people feel safe—and people 
feel safe when they know they will not be demeaned or 
degraded for proposing a change, or trying to get through one. 
Temporary loss of mastery is embarrassing enough for most of us; 
catching any kind of gratuitous flack for floundering in Chaos 
guarantees that everyone will flee back to the security of the Old 
Status Quo. 

Our natural fear of Chaos may help to explain why learning 
something as a child appears so much easier than learning the 
same thing as an adult. 


MAKING CHANGE POSSIBLE 201 

Watching and listening to adults and children on their 
first ski trips, we get the distinct impression that adults 
are not so much concerned with injuring themselves as 
they are with making fools of themselves. Kids almost 
never have that thought. They may actually choose to 
fall down in the snow, to roll in it, to throw it, to eat it. 
(Our natural adult response to snow is to shovel it so 
we won't slip.) On the slopes, adults don't want to fall 
where they can be seen by those in the chairlift. The 
anticipated humiliation is enough to keep them in the 
lodge. But give a healthy kid a lesson or two with a ski 
instructor, and it's "Look at me, I'm Picabo Street!" 

—Tim and Tom, Amateur Behaviorists (1998) 

How many times have you heard that some new technique is 
going to be used because it is the only chance to make the hard-
and-fast deadline, and that if the deadline is missed, there will be 
hell to pay? The setup of the change has already made its outcome 
more than a little dubious. The kid-like willingness to 
throw ourselves into a potentially embarrassing endeavor is 
defeated by the potential for ridicule. 

Paradoxically, change only has a chance of succeeding if 
failure—at least a little bit of failure—is also okay. 


Chapter 31
HUMAN CAPITAL


Somewhere not too far from you as you read these words, 
there is probably a heating or air-conditioning unit in operation. 
Electricity and possibly some combustible fuel are working to 
alter the local atmosphere to keep you comfortable. These things 
cost money. You, or your company, pay the bill each month, 
annotating the charge as Utilities, or some such. Let's say that the 
bill for the month of March is $100, that it's paid by the company, 
and that the company has no other financial transaction all month: 
no income, no salaries, no nothing. Just one utility bill. At the 
end of the month, the organization's profit-and-loss statement 
looks like this: 

Whatever Corp. 

March 1998 

OrdinaryIncome/
Expense 
UtilitiesTotal ExpenseExpense 
>
Mar'98 
100.00 < 
100.00 
Net Ordinary Income -100.00 
Net Income -100.00 


Figure 31.1. P&L for the first month. 

202 


HUMAN CAPITAL 203 

The statement shows a loss for the month, since expenses exceeded 
income. 

The next month is also a bit slow. Again, the company has 
no income and no salaries. But now the weather has warmed up, 
producing a month of perfect April days in which you left the 
windows open and never turned on the heat. So, there is no utility 
bill to pay. You do, however, cut one check: You buy a tiny 
palm-top computer for $100. When you write the check, you 
enter it as "Computing Equipment," since that is the most obvious 
of the expenditure categories suggested by your accounting package. 
At the end of this month, your P&L looks like this: 


Figure 31.2. P&L for the second month. 

Last month, your single $100 check netted against no 
income resulted in a loss. This month, the single check for $100 
netted against no income produced a break-even. Why the difference? 
The difference can only be attributed to the different categories 
you chose for the expenditures. In March, an expenditure 
for Utilities was treated as an expense; in April, an expenditure 
for Computing Equipment received an entirely different treatment. 
Your accounting package understood that Computing 
Equipment is just another kind of asset, like money in a different 
bank account. So, it treated the check like a transfer from one 
bank account to another. It had no effect on profit and loss. 

An expense is money that gets used up. At the end of the 
month, the money is gone and so is the heat (or whatever the 
expense was for). An investment, on the other hand, is use of an 
asset to purchase another asset. The value has not been used up, 
but only converted from one form to another. When you treat an 
expenditure as an investment instead of as an expense, you are 
said to be capitalizing the expenditure. 


204 PEOPLEWARE 

How AboutPeople? 

What about money that the company spends on people? The general 
accounting convention is that all salaries are treated as 
expense, never as capital investment. Sometimes this makes 
sense, but sometimes it doesn't. When a worker is building a 
product that gets sold, it hardly matters: Whether you expense his 
labor or capitalize it, the amount of money paid to the worker 
eventually gets deducted from the sales price of the product, in 
order to calculate profit. You can hardly be faulted for expensing 
his labor the same way you expense the heat that kept the factory 
warm; both the labor and the heat are gone at the end of the 
month. 

But now suppose you send that same worker off to a training 
seminar for a week. His salary and the seminar fee have been 
spent on something that is not "gone" at the end of the month. 
Whatever he has learned persists in his head through the coming 
months. If you've spent your training money wisely, it is an 
investment, perhaps a very good one. But, by accounting convention, 
we expense it anyway. 

So Who Cares? 

What matters is not so much how the bean counters must report 
these things to the IRS or to the stockholders, but how managers 
think about the amount their company has invested in its people. 
This human capital can be substantial; thinking about it erroneously 
as sunk expense may lead managers toward actions that 
fail to preserve the value of the organization's investment. 

Of course, "actions that fail to preserve an organization's 
investment" are a staple of imperfect management. Companies 
go through periods in which middle and upper managers vie to 
out-do each other in thinking up ways to improve near-term performance 
(quarterly earnings) by sacrificing the longer term. 
This is usually called "bottom-line consciousness," but we prefer 
to give it another name: "eating the seed corn." 

Assessing the Investment in Human Capital 

How much does your company have invested in you and your colleagues? 
An easy way to get a handle on this amount is to consider 
what happens when one of you leaves: Suppose, for example, 


HUMAN CAPITAL 205 

that Louise, your database expert, announces she will depart at the 
end of the month. Prior to this, you had been feeling pretty good 
about prospects that your five-person team would be able to deliver 
a new version of your company's sales capture system by next 
summer. The tasks had been moving along smoothly, and the 
team was well-knit and highly effective. At least it was before 
Louise dropped her bombshell. Now, who knows? What a disaster. 
You get Personnel on the phone and give the bad news. 
"Louise is leaving on the thirty-first," you report. Then you ask, 
hopefully, "Can you get me another Louise?" 

Unfortunately, Personnel is fresh out of experts with 
Louise's grasp of the requirements, the technology, the domain, 
and the people involved. "How about a Ralph?" your contact 
suggests. You have never heard of Ralph, nor has anyone else on 
the team, but he seems to be the only game in town, so you agree. 
The deal is done. Louise leaves on the thirty-first, and Ralph 
moves in the next day. 

In one sense, the project has experienced no disruption at 
all. You had five people on the thirty-first, and you've got five 
people again on the first. If Ralph earns about the same as 
Louise, the company is dutifully buying people-time for you at 
the same rate as last month, and the team will be supplied with 
precisely five person-months this month, exactly as it would have 
been if Louise had stayed on. If the project was on-schedule last 
month, it should still be on-schedule now. So what are you bellyaching 
about? 

Well, let's look at how Ralph spends his first day with the 
company. There was a certain amount of database work remaining 
that Louise left on her plate when she departed; how much 
does Ralph chip away of that remaining work on Day One? Of 
course, the answer is Nothing. He doesn't do squat. He spends 
the whole day filling out forms for his health insurance, learning 
how to order-in lunch, getting his supplies, configuring his workstation, 
and having his PC connected to the network. His net production 
is zero. Whoops, it may even be less than zero. If he 
uses up any of the other people's time—and you know he is going 
to, just to get his basic questions answered—then his net contribution 
to team production for the day will be negative. 

Okay, that's Day One; how about Day Two? Day Two is a 
little better. He is now fully involved, reading the notes that 
Louise left for him. This is work that Louise wouldn't have had 
to do herself had she stayed on, since she knew all that stuff cold. 


206 PEOPLEWARE 

(She wouldn't have had to write the notes either if she hadn't 
been about to leave.) Ralph's production rate is still far lower 
than Louise's would have been. He may still have a negative 
effect, since he is still likely to need help from the rest of the 
team, using up time that team members would have applied to the 
work had they not had Ralph to support. 

Eventually, your new teammate is completely up to speed, 
producing at more or less the same rate that Louise did. Real productivity 
of the database worker position over time looks something 
like this: 


Figure 31.3. Lost production due to change of personnel. 

Productivity took a hit when Louise left, even passing below 
zero for a while as others scurried to make up for the loss of a 
well-integrated team member. Then, eventually, it worked its 
way up to where it was before. 

The shaded area on the graph represents the lost production 
(work that didn't get done) caused by Louise's departure. Or, 
viewed differently, it is the investment that the company is now 
making to get Ralph up where Louise was after the company's 
past investments in her skills and capabilities. 

We could put a dollar figure on the shaded area based on 
how much the organization had to pay for time that wasn't productive. 
If it takes Ralph six months to get up to speed and his 
progress is essentially linear, then the investment is approximately 
half the total time—that is, three person-months of effort. The 
dollar figure for this investment is whatever the company pays 
Ralph for salary and overhead during three months. 


HUMAN CAPITAL 207 

What Is the Ramp-up Time for an Experienced Worker? 

Six months to progress from being a slightly negative producer to 
performing at the rate of your predecessor? This might be a reasonable 
provision for a new applications programmer, but it probably 
wouldn't be nearly enough for anyone joining a team that 
does even slightly more sophisticated work. When we oblige our 
clients to put a figure on ramp-up time for new workers, most 
have to allow far longer than six months. One of our clients, a 
builder of network protocol analyzers and packet sniffers, estimates 
that it takes more than two years to bring a new worker up 
to speed. They only hire people who have a firm grasp of the 
underlying technology, so the two years is the added time to learn 
the specific domain and to fit into the team. The net capital 
investment in each new worker is therefore something in excess 
of $150,000. 

Now suppose there is another round of lean-and-mean 
downsizing, and the company has to consider laying off such a 
person. Yes, the ongoing expense of the worker's salary and 
overhead would be saved, but the $150,000 investment would be 
lost. If the company takes account of this fact, it might see that it 
can't possibly iafford to lay off such a valuable resource. 

Playing Up to Wall Street 

Through years of layoffs, cutbacks, downsizings, right-sizings, 
and retractions, Wall Street has applauded each and every cut as 
though such retreat were the object of the exercise. It's worth 
pointing out that it isn't: 

The object of the exercise is upsizing, not downsizing. 

Companies that downsize are frankly admitting that their upper 
management has blown it. 

But Wall Street still applauds. Why is that? Part of the reason 
is that it looks so good on the books. A few thousand 
employees gone, and every penny they would have earned goes 
right to the bottom line, or at least it seems to. What's conveniently 
forgotten in this analysis is the investment in those people—
paid for with real, hard-earned dollars and now thrown out 
the window as if it had no value. 


208 PEGPLEWARE


There is probably no hope of changing the view that Wall 
Street takes of treating investment in people as an expense. But 
companies that play this game will suffer in the long run. The 
converse is also true: Companies that manage their investment 
sensibly will prosper in the long run. Companies of knowledge-
workers have to realize that it is their investment in human capital 
that matters most. The good ones already do. 


Chapter 32


ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING


Some organizations can learn and some can't. Some can 
learn a lesson in the abstract but can't change themselves to take 
advantage of what they have learned. Some can learn, but the 
pace of their learning is offset by the pace of their unlearning. 
We all understand that the difference between being among the 
learning washed, as opposed to among the learning unwashed, is 
a matter of vital importance, because non-learners cannot expect 
to prosper for very long without learning, a critical improvement 
mechanism. 

Experience and Learning 

The first thing to realize about organizational learning is that it is 
not the same as simple accumulation of experience. By the 
1930s, for example, the French army had accumulated hundreds 
of years of experience in guarding the eastern borders, but it still 
proposed the Maginot Line as a way to hold back the Germans. 
That decision and the events of May 1940 proved to the world 
that the French had not learned a key lesson about the shifting 
balance between armor and mobility. 

Similarly, high-tech organizations may accumulate experience 
at an astonishing rate^ but there is no guarantee that their 
learning will keep track: 

209 


210 PEOPLEWARE 

One of my clients has a long history of software development, 
now going back more than 30 years. Through 
much of this period, they have kept a thousand or more 
software developers at work. So they can brag, without 
exaggeration, that they have more than 30,000 person-
years of software experience. I was greatly impressed: 
Imagine all that learning being brought to bear on each 
new project. So I asked a group of them, When you 
send a new manager off to run a new software project, 
what words of wisdom do you whisper in his or her 
ear? They thought for just a moment and then gave 
their answer, almost in unison: "Good luck." 

—TRL 

Experience gets turned into learning when an organization 
alters itself to take account of what experience has shown. This 
alteration takes two forms, which are different enough to talk 
about separately: 

. The organization instills new skills and approaches in its 
people. 
or 

. The organization redesigns itself to operate in some different 
manner. 
In the first case, the change is the direct result of added human 
capital (see Chapter 31 for more on this). If the retrained people 
leave, the investment is lost and the learning is gone. In the second 
case, the change is temporarily in the heads of individuals 
who implement the redesign. Eventually, it becomes part of the 
bone-knowledge of the organization, but in the interim it resides 
only in the participants' minds. In this case, loss of key people 
during the transition can jeopardize the learning. 

In either case, the self-transforming organization has to face 
up to the following irreducible risk: 

Learning is limited by an organization's ability to 
keep its people. 


ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING 211 

When turnover is high, learning is unlikely to stick or can't take 
place at all. In such an organization, attempts to change skills or 
to introduce redesigned procedures are an exercise in futility. 
They may even act perversely to accelerate the rate of employee 
turnover. 

Redesign Example 

Some of the most compelling stories of organizational learning 
involve redesign of the supplier chain. This requires a confident 
hand at the helm and a willingness to think outside of organizational 
boundaries. Consider the following example, elaborating 
on a suggestion first made by Nicholas Negroponte: 

A company like Amazon.com has an integral (and 
potentially exploitable) link to whatever corporate partner 
it chooses for delivery of its products to the end 
consumer. In its current form, the company may have 
Federal Express pick up books from its warehouse in 
Seattle, for example, and fly them to Memphis (the 
FedEx hub city) and then to the airport nearest to the 
consumer Now suppose that Amazon were to relocate 
its warehouse to the field beside the FedEx Memphis 
airstrip. The sale of each book would still be processed 
at Amazon's headquarters, but now the pick list and 
shipping information would be transmitted digitally to 
Memphis, where the orders would be assembled. 
Advantage to Amazon: reduction by half of the shipping 
distance for each order. It presumably could now negotiate 
a more favorable rate from Federal Express to 
reduce the shipping cost further. 

Organizations that can make this kind of change can do it 
again and again. You might wonder what it is that allows them to 
be so agile. 

The Key Question About Organizational Learning 

The key question about organizational learning is not how it is 
done but where. When an organization changes itself as much as 
the Amazon.com example suggests, there has to be a small but 
active learning center that conceives of, designs, and directs the 


212 PEOPLEWARE 

change. (This kind of ambitious change can't be invented by a 
committee or by the organization as a whole.) The locus of early 
change activity—the learning—has to be located somewhere on 
the organization chart. Where? 

It's tempting to say that it happens at the top. But tops of 
organizations, in our experience, are not so much focused on day-
to-day operations. Presidents of large- to medium-size companies, 
for example, may spend most of their time making acquisitions 
(or fighting them off). 

There is a nice, egalitarian ring to the notion that the learning 
center might be at the bottom. But don't count on this happening 
in the real world. People at the bottom are typically too 
constrained by the organizational boundaries, and might be blind 
to important possibilities. In any event, they rarely have the 
power to effect change. 

If the key learning doesn't happen at the top and it doesn't 
happen at the bottom, then it has to occur somewhere in the middle. 
That means the most natural learning center for most organizations 
is at the level of that much-maligned institution, middle 
management. This squares exactly with our own observation that 
successful learning organizations are always characterized by 
strong middle management. 

It's worth pointing out that downsizings, when they happen, 
are almost always targeted at middle management. In other 
words, the proverbial "tightening ship" activity that has its vogue 
every few years is often at the expense of organizational learning. 
After such an exercise, an organization's learning center may be 
destroyed. 

The Management Team 

Flattening the org chart by gutting middle management is a sure 
recipe for decreased learning. But the converse is not necessarily 
true: Holding on to middle management doesn't, by itself, make 
learning more likely to prosper. There is another ingredient 
required for that, one that is seldom evaluated properly and 
almost never cultivated. In order for a vital learning center to 
form, middle managers must communicate with each other and 
learn to work together in effective harmony. This is an extremely 
rare phenomenon. 

Almost all companies have something they call The 
Management Team, typically made up of middle-management 


ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING 213 

peers. As we observed earlier, applying the word team to a group 
doesn't assure that it will have any of the characteristics of a 
team. It may still be a poorly knit collection of individuals who 
have no common goals, common values, or blended skills. This 
is usually the case with most so-called management teams. 

A good helping of the teamicidal effects we noted in 
Chapters 20 and 27 is at work on "teams" of managers: Group 
members are made defensive, burdened by bureaucracy, assigned 
fragmented tasks, physically separated, pressured to work overtime, 
and goaded into competition with each other. With all that 
going against them, they are unlikely to merge into a meaningful 
whole. 

To make matters worse, they don't have the one thing that 
any team needs in order to jell: common ownership of the work 
product. Anything that gets accomplished in such a group is likely 
to be the accomplishment of one of its members, not the group 
as a whole. The more competitive the managers are, the more 
pronounced this effect. We have even encountered extreme cases 
in which the rule was: "If something looks good, grab it; if you 
can't grab it, kill it." 

The Management Team is, most often, a sad misnomer, a 
mockery of the kind of behavior and attitude that characterizes a 
healthy team. The members sit together regularly at status meetings, 
taking turns talking to the upper manager. But they have little 
to do with each other. 

Danger le the White Space 

The most likely learning center for any sizable organization is the 
white space that lies between and among middle managers. If 
this white space becomes a vital channel of communication, if 
middle managers can act together as the redesigners of the organization, 
sharing a common stake in the result, then the benefits of 
learning are likely to be realized. If, on the other hand, the white 
space is empty of communication and common purpose, learning 
comes to a standstill. Organizations in which middle managers 
are isolated, embattled, and fearful are nonstarters in this respect. 





Figure 32.1. Learning happens in the white space. 

Middle managers are isolated, embattled, and fearful—does 
that sound familiar? It is, unfortunately, the case in most knowledge-
based organizations today. Instead of being inclined to join 
forces with their peers, many middle managers report being afraid 
of them. This is what our colleague Suzanne Robertson calls 
"danger in the white space." This destructive tension is the death 
knell for organizational learning. 


The ultimate management sin is wasting people's time. It 
sounds like this should be an easy sin to avoid, but it isn't. You 
have some needs of your own as a manager, and these needs may 
run squarely against your intention to preserve and use wisely the 
time of the people working under you. 

For Instance 

You call a meeting with your staff but arrive late yourself (you 
had to take an urgent call from your own boss), leaving the others 
to cool their heels. You let yourself be called out of the meeting 
for a quick but important chat with the client, and the meeting 
loses focus without you. Or, maybe the meeting itself is a waste 
of everyone's time (except possibly your own). In our consulting 
work, we often find ourselves sitting in on meetings that, to all 
outward appearances, look like they are intended to accomplish 
some work purpose, but which may really be intended for something 
else entirely: 

The meeting started out with a few minutes of easy 
banter, a lighthearted comment addressed to each one 
of those present by Ambrose, the boss. Each recipient 
rose to the bait and offered an equally lighthearted 
riposte, all in good fun. Then there was a sharp change 

215 


216 PEOPLEWARE 

of mood as Ambrose took control. Issues were set out 
on the table and addressed, briefly and very efficiently. 
Each issue was discussed with one of the participants. 
There was a short dialogue between Ambrose and that 
person, a transfer of status information so that Ambrose 
would know exactly what progress had been made that 
week. During the meeting, the time was about equally 
focused on each of the participants, each interacting 
separately with the boss while the others listened in, 
silently. During Elaine's moment in the sun, I could see 
that Roger was distracted, obviously planning what he 
would say when Ambrose turned to him. At the end of 
the meeting, Ambrose established action items, more 
or less one per person. What could possibly be wrong 
with this oh-so-familiar picture? What's wrong to my 
mind is that this is not a meeting at all; it's a ceremony. 

—TDM 

When you convoke a meeting with n people present, the 
normal presumption is that all those in the room are there because 
they need to interact with each other in order to come to certain 
conclusions. When, instead, the participants take turns interacting 
with one key figure, the expected rationale for assembling the 
whole group is missing; the boss might just as well have interacted 
separately with each of the subordinates without obliging the 
others to listen in. 

We said at the beginning that it was your need—the boss's 
need—that was being served, perhaps at the expense of some of 
the subordinates' time. But isn't this okay? Isn't this what bosses 
have to do in order to keep control? Isn't this a legitimate cost of 
managing and coordinating complex efforts? Yes and no. The 
meeting wasn't really necessary to convey status; there are many 
less wasteful ways to do that. The need that was being served 
was not the boss's need for information, but for reassurance. The 
ceremony supplies reassurance. It establishes for everyone that 
the boss is boss, that he or she gets to run the meeting, that attendance 
is expected, that the hierarchy is being respected. 

Status Meetings Are About Status 

A real working meeting is called when there is a real reason for 
all the people invited to think through some matter together. The 


THE ULTIMATE MANAGEMENT SIN IS... 217 

purpose of the meeting is to reach consensus. Such a meeting is, 
almos_t by definition, an ad hoc affair. Ad hoc implies that the 
meeting is unlikely to be regularly scheduled. Any regular get-
together is therefore somewhat suspect as likely to have a ceremonial 
purpose rather than a focused goal of consensus. The 
weekly status meeting is an obvious example. Though its goal 
may seem to be status reporting, its real intent is status confirming. 
And it's not the status of the work, but the status of the boss. 

Organizations have need of ceremony. It's perfectly reasonable 
to call a meeting with a purpose that is strictly ceremonial, 
particularly at project milestones, when new people come on 
board, or for celebrating good work by the group. Such meetings 
do not waste anyone's time. They fulfill real needs for appreciation. 
They confirm group membership—its importance and its 
value. Ceremonial meetings that only celebrate the bossness of 
the boss, however, are a waste. 

When bosses are particularly needy, the burden of ceremonial 
status meetings can grow almost without bound. We know of 
one organization, for example, where daily two-hour status meetings 
are the norm. When participants are off-site during a meeting, 
they are expected to call in and participate by speakerphone 
for the whole duration. Nonattendance is regarded as a threat and 
is subject to serious penalties. 

Early Overstaffing 

Meetings are not the only way that people's time gets wasted. 
When staff is brought on too quickly at the beginning of a project, 
there is almost always a waste of people's time. Again, you 
might think this is an easy sin to avoid: Just figure out how 
quickly the work can absorb new people, then bring them on, 
only at that rate. Although this makes perfectly good sense, it is 
often politically infeasible. 

Projects begin with planning and design, activities that are 
best carried out by a smallish team. When design is important (as 
it is for anything but a simple formula project), it can require as 
much as half the full project duration. This suggests an ideal 
staffing plan that resembles the following: 





Figure 33.1. Looks odd, but may be the ideal. 

For a two-year project, the bulk of the staff would not come onboard 
until the project is six months to a year under way. But so 
what? The staffing plan looks a little unusual, but if that's what's 
called for, why not staff it just that way? 

The problem makes itself apparent when the project is under 
a time constraint—and what project isn't? If the client and upper 
management have decreed, for example, that only a year is 
allowed for the work, then that limit will truncate the expected 
end of the project: 


-

Figure 33.2. Hurried-up project (aborted staffing). 

There is a natural inclination to take the effort lopped off the end 
and apply it back at the beginning. Voila, a project with this 
familiar pattern of early overstafflng: 


THE ULTIMATE MANAGEMENT SIN IS . . . 219



Figure 33.3. Early overstating to accommodlate a deadline. 

Of course, if you knew the early added effort would just be wasted, 
you wouldn't do that, would you? Well, perhaps you would. 
You may conclude that your chances of finishing on such an 
aggressive schedule, no matter how you staff the project, are virtually 
nil. And if you're going to finish late anyway, you'd better 
consider now whether it will look better or worse for you not to 
have added the extra staff that upper management is willing to 
furnish early in the project. Even if that early staff allocation 
turns out to be wasted, your political situation may be safer with 
all those people on-board early than if you were to proceed leanly 
staffed through the first six months. Such early understaffing—as 
it's sure to be viewed by disappointed upper management—may 
make you look like a Little Leaguer. 

How common is it that projects are overstaffed early for 
such political reasons? Oh, not very. Probably no more than 
ninety percent of all projects suffer from early overstaffing. 

It is a sad comment on the prevailing culture in development 
organizations that, in spite of all the talk about "lean and mean," 
it is politically unsafe for a manager to run a project leanly staffed 
through the key analysis and design activities. 

Fragmentation Again 

When people's time is wasted in unnecessary meetings or by early 
overstaffing, they'll know it. They'll be frustrated and they'll 
know why. If there is enough of such waste, they'll probably let 
you know about it, too. So these problems, though serious, are at 
least not invisible. There is, however, one way that people's time 


220 PEOPLEWARE 

gets wasted that is likely to go unnoticed, and thus uncorrected. 
This has to do with the time fragmentation we first mentioned in 
our discussion of teamicide in Chapter 20. The point there was 
that fragmenting any knowledge-worker's time over many different 
tasks assures that he or she will be thrust into two or more different 
work groups, none of which is likely to jell into a real team. 

Fragmented time is almost certain to be teamicidal, but it 
also has another insidious effect: It is guaranteed to waste the 
individual's time. A worker with multiple assignments—a little 
new development, some maintenance of a legacy product, some 
sales support, and perhaps a bit of end user hand-holding—will 
spend a significant part of each day switching gears. This time is 
largely invisible. The worker sets aside a design task to field a 
telephone call, works with the caller for twenty minutes to offer 
guidance about reconfiguring a database on one of the company's 
early products, and then turns back to the design task. If you 
were standing beside this person with a stop watch, you would 
probably have noted no wasted time at all. The waste is concealed 
in the slow restart of his or her design work, the direct 
result of interrupted flow. 

Fragmentation is particularly injurious when two of the 
tasks involve qualitatively different kinds of work habits. Thus, 
the mix of a design task (which requires lots of immersion time, 
relative quiet, and quality interaction time with a small group) 
with a telephone support task (which requires instant interruptibility, 
constant availability, quick change of focus) is sure to make 
progress on the more think-intensive of these tasks virtually 
impossible. The time wasted continually trying to get restarted is 
perceived only as frustration by the worker. You may never hear 
about it, because the people who suffer from this problem are all 
too likely to blame themselves. 

Respecting YourInvestment 

My consulting over these last few years has, for some 
reason, required more and more travel to Europe. I 
have begun taking the day flights from Boston to 
London, as they seem to be less of a trial for my now 
permanently jet-lagged body. Unfortunately, most of 
the other European capitals are served only by night 
flights out of Boston. I railed against this until an airline 
employee patiently pointed out to me that his company 


THE ULTIMATE MANAGEMENT SIN IS ... 221 

was reluctant to let a giant investment like a 747 sit on 
the tarmac for all the extra hours that would be 
required to connect an east-west day flight with a west-
east day flight 747s, after all, represent a ton of 
money. 

—TDM 

The human capital invested in your work force also represents 
a ton of money. If your company employs a few thousand 
knowledge-workers, it could easily have enough invested in them 
to be the equivalent of a modern wide-body aircraft. Wasting the 
time of that huge investment is money poured down the drain. 


Chapter 34 

THE MAKING OF COMMUNITY


In this final chapter, we turn to what great managers do best: 

the making of community. A need for community is something 

that is built right into the human firmware: 

During my school years, my family insisted on moving 
almost every year, and I rarely finished a school year in 
the same town where I had begun it. I had a complete 
change of friends, acquaintances, and teachers nearly 
every year. One of the few constants in my life was the 
set of basal readers that were used by the New 
England schools in those years; these books were 
used in every school that I attended. The text concerned 
a family that had lived in one town, a place 
called Winchester, since the 1770s. Each year, the 
class studied a subsequent generation of the family, 
until by sixth grade we had followed it through the 
Revolution and all the way into the early twentieth century. 
While the characters in that family are long since 
forgotten to me, I retain a vivid memory of the town. 
Winchester was a place where everyone knew everyone, 
where people stayed put from generation to generation, 
where a lost dog or a troubled child was everybody's 
concern, and where you looked out for your 
neighbors when calamity happened. If I have any roots 
at all, I guess they're in Winchester. 

—TDM 

222 


THE MAKING OF COMMUNITY 223 

If there is something deep inside you that responds to the 
idea of such a town, it's probably because you don't presently live 
in one. The lovely little Winchesters of the world began to 
change and disappear in the 1920s. Most of us today live in 
places that aren't really communities at all. People don't know 
their neighbors very well, they commute out to work someplace 
else, and nobody expects the kids to settle down in the same 
town. Bedroom communities, in particular, are all bedroom and 
no community. 

But we still have a strong need for community. The complicated 
truth of our times is that most of our towns no longer satisfy 
this need. It is instead in the workplace that we have our best 
chance offindingcommunity. If it's there to be found ... 

Digression on Corporate Politics 

Community doesn't just happen on the job. It has to be made. 
The people who make it are the unsung heroes of our work experience. 


The science of making communities, making them healthy 
and satisfying for all, is called politics. We hasten to add that it's 
not the shameless shenanigans of corporate infighting that we're 
going to address here; those are the pathologies of politics. What 
we need to look at instead is "Politics, the Noble Science," as first 
described by Aristotle. 

Aristotle included Politics among the five interlinked Noble 
Sciences that together make up Philosophy. The five are 

. Metaphysics: the study of existence, the nature of the 
universe and all its contents 
. Logic: the ways we may know something, the set of permissible 
conclusions we may draw based on our perceptions, 
and some sensible rules of deduction and inference 
. Ethics: what we know about man and what we may 
deduce and infer (through Logic) about acceptable interactions 
between pairs of individuals 
. Politics: how we may logically extend Ethics to the larger 
group, the science of creating and managing such 
groups consistent with ethical behavior and logical 
recognition of the metaphysical entities—humans and 
the community made up of humans 



. Aesthetics: the appreciation of symbols and images of 
metaphysical reality, which are pleasing to the extent 
that they are logically consistent and that they inform us 
about ethical interaction and/or political harmony 
You may be quite sure that you want no part of office politics of 
the sleazy kind, but Aristotelian Politics is something else entirely. 
Aristotelian Politics is the key practice of good management. 
Refusing to be political in the Aristotelian sense is disastrous; it is 
an abnegation of the manager's real responsibility. Similarly, 
senior workers at all levels share some responsibility for community-
building. They are the elders of whatever community does 
form. 

Why It Matters 

An organization that succeeds in building a satisfying community 
tends to keep its people. When the sense of community is strong 
enough, no one wants to leave. The investment made in human 
capital is thus retained, and upper management finds itself willing 
to invest more. When the company invests more in its people, the 
people perform better and feel better about themselves and about 
their company. This makes them still less likely to move on. The 
positive reinforcement here is all to the good. 

Of course, even the best sense of on-the-job community 
doesn't assure that you will keep all your people forever. Some 
will know they have to leave to advance their own careers or for 
whatever other reason. However, when people do leave such an 
organization, they tend to time their departures to minimally 
inconvenience the community. This is an extraordinary boon to 
anyone doing project work, since it means that workers are 
unlikely to leave during the project. This effect alone, of departing 
only at project end, is worth more than all the process 
improvement your organization is likely to make over the next 
decade. 

So far, we've discussed only the tangible, dollars-and-cents 
benefits. There is an intangible at work here, too, one that's liable 
to have even more significance to you than all the rest. To consider 
it, cast your mind forward, just for a moment, to that day in the 
distant future, when you are about to cash in your chips. You're 
on your deathbed at the grand old age of, let's say, a hundred and 
one. You're in no great discomfort, only old. At this age, your 


THE MAKING OF COMMUNITY 225 

thoughts are all in the past. You're taking stock. You ask yourself 
the question, What really mattered in my life and what didn't? It's 
no great surprise that many of the concerns that utterly obsessed 
you all those years ago (for example, getting that humongous version 
27 build of WhizBang v6.1.1 to stabilize) don't figure very 
prominently in your deathbed assessment. No, you're much more 
likely to think about warm family relations, kids and grandkids, 
the house and all its memories. Any contribution from your 
work? Well, sure, it was nice to be part of the coming-of-age of 
the Information Era. It was good to rise to the top of a company, 
or nearly to the top, to have your chance at setting directions. 
That was nice. But don't forget that you also succeeded at creating 
a real community within that company, something that people 
loved and respected and gave their allegiance to. Now, that was 
an accomplishment. That's got to figure very prominently in your 
sense of what you have done with your life. The pleasure you 
take from that—-like the pleasure that Michelangelo must have 
felt, mulling over his contributions—need have no very strong 
connection to their cash value at the time. This was a creation. 
This was Art, you tell yourself, and the person who made it happen 
was an Artist. 

Pulling Off the Magic 

Okay, so community is good, so it is an admirable goal to build 
community in the workplace. How is it done? 

We are not going to presume to set forth a formula for such 
a complicated matter. There is no formula. Like any work of art, 
your success at fostering community is going to require substantial 
talent, courage, and creativity. It will also need an enormous 
investment of time. The work will not be completed by you 
alone; at best, you will be the catalyst. The form of your creation 
will not be very much like anyone else's. 

So, in place of a formula, we offer instead an example, a 
single example. The example comes from one of our client companies, 
a company where one enterprising manager stepped in 
and changed the culture forever. This catalytic genius persuaded 
the organization to build itself around a school. The school is 
made up of a day-care and preschool center, plus classes for 
kindergartners through fifth graders. The school is for the children 
of employees. 


226 PEQPLEWARE


No doubt you can see the dollars-and-cents rationale for this, 
the unique advantage the company gained for hiring programmers 
and engineers in a tight market. But you'd have to walk through 
the company to see what the school does for community. You'd 
have to be mere for that moment every afternoon when the teachers 
lead the entire student body through the whole facility. They 
make up a noisy, funny, triumphantly silly parade of little kids 
whooping it up and saying hello to everyone. You can hear them 
coming a mile away. All work pauses for the procession. There 
are lots of hugs. When it's over, everyone feels great. 

Imagine having been the person responsible for that. Imagine 
having that to look back at from the age of a hundred and one. 


CHAPTER 1


p. 3 The DeMarco/Lister project surveys are described in DeMarco, 
1977; DeMarco, 1978; DeMarco, 1982; and DeMarco and Lister, 
1985. 
p. 4 The figure on the failure rate of projects of twenty-five work-years 
or larger comes from Jones, 1981. 

CHAPTER 2 

p. 8 We have used the terms "thinking worker," "development worker," 
"knowledge worker," and "intellect worker" at various times in the 
book, but they all refer to people who must think for a living. 
p. 12 There is unfortunately no National Bureau of Facts to collect and 
publish hard data on the percent of time a developer spends on such 
activities as strategic thinking and investigation of new methods. 
The five percent figure cited in the text is derived from experiments 
in which technical workers either thought out loud for an observer as 
they tackled their problems, or they allowed themselves to be 
observed through a one-way glass. For a selection of such studies, 
see Soloway and lyengar, 1986. 
p. 12 The statistics on both ownership and reading come from private correspondence 
with the late Karl Karlstrom, then Senior Editor and 
Assistant Vice President of the College Division at Prentice-Hall, 1981. 
227 


228 NOTES 

CHAPTERS 

pp. 13-16 The lyrics as well asjhe chapter's title are from Billy Joel's 1977 
album entitled "The Stranger," and are reprinted with 


p. 17 For discussion of Data General's Eagle project, see Kidder, 1981. 
CHAPTER 4 

p. 21 See Jones, 1981 for data on the prevailing standards of software 
quality. 
p. 22 Tajima and Matsubara, 1984, p. 40. 
p. 22 See Crosby, 1979. 
CHAPTERS 

p. 24 For more on this famous law, see Parkinson, 1954. 
p. 26 For the latest figures from the New South Wales studies, see Jeffery 
and Lawrence, 1985. 
p. 26 See Boehm, 1982. 
p. 27 Tables 5.1 and 5.2 are adapted from Jeffery and Lawrence, 1985. 
p. 28 Quote is from Jones, 1986, p. 213. 
p. 28 Table 5.3 is from Jeffery and Lawrence, 1985. 
p. 29 You're right to worry that the twenty-four projects for which no estimate 
was made might have been special in some other way: either 
shorter projects, or those with senior personnel. We did look into 
the data for such obvious biases and they weren't there to be found. 
CHAPTER 6 

p. 32 Data on the (pitifully small) increase in software industry productivity 
was taken from Morrissey and Wu, 1980. 
CHAPTER 7 

p. 40 Christopher Alexander presents the case for windowed workspace in 
Alexander et al., 1977. More about windows in Chapter 13. 
CHAPTER 8 

p. 44 The conduct of and data from the 1977 through 1981 public productivity 
studies are presented in DeMarco, 1982. The Coding War 
Games are described in detail in DeMarco and Lister, 1985. 

NOTES 229 

p. 45 Figure 8.1 showing productivity variation and the three rules of 
thumb are derived from three sources: Boehm, 1981, pp. 435-37, 
447; Sackman et al., 1968, pp. 3-11; and Augustine, 1979. A subsequent 
study by Michael Lawrence of the University of New South 
Wales lends further weight to the three rules (see Lawrence, 1981). 
p. 46 Figure 8.2 showing variation in performance in Coding War Games 
1984 is adapted from DeMarco and Lister, 1985. 
p. 47 For more about the very weak relationships between productivity 
and factors such as salary and experience, see Lawrence and Jeffery, 
1983. 
p. 48 The Harlan Mills quote is from Mills, 1983, p. 266. 
p. 50 We are not alone in reporting on the linked effects of workplace and 
productivity. For a complementary view, see Boehm et al., 1984. 
CHAPTER 9 

p. 51 The figures on space costs are adapted from Brill, 1983. 
p. 52 SeeBrunner, 1972.
pp. 52-53 Quote from Data Management: See Dittrich, 1984.
p. 53 For details on the IBM studies, see McCue, 1978. 
p. 54 Figure 9.1: See DeMarco and Lister, 1985. 
INTERMEZZO | 

p. 59 Gilb is not the only or even the first person to make the point about 
measurability. See, for example. Chapter 2 of Gilbert, 1978. 
p. 60 For productivity measurement schemes, see Albrecht, 1979; Bailey 
and Basili, 1981; Boehm, 1981; Jones, 1986; and DeMarco, 1982. 
p. 60 The assessment service mentioned is Software Evaluation and 
Assessment Service, available from Quantitative Software Management, 
McLean, VA. 
pp. 60-61 See DeMarco, 1982 for more on the idea of blind measurement of 
individual characteristics. 

CHAPTER 10 

p. 62 Table 10.1: See McCue, 1978. 
p. 63 For more about flow, see Goleman, 1986 and Brady, 1986. 
p. 67 ESS stands for Electronic Switching System. 

230 NOTES 

CHAPTER 12 

p. 78 The Cornell experiment was never documented and has thus taken 
on the status of hearsay evidence except for those of us who were 
there. For a concurring view of the effect of music on concentration, 
see Jaynes, 1976, pp. 367-68. 
CHAPTER 13


pp. 81 -82 Reprinted with permission from Alexander, 1979, p. 7.
pp. 83-84 Reprinted with permission from Alexander et al., 1975, pp. 10-11.


p. 84 Graphic is reprinted from Alexander et al., 1975, p. 46.
p. 85 Graphic is reprinted from Alexander et al., 1977, p. 846.
pp. 85-86 Reprinted with permission from Alexander et al., 1977, pp. 847-51.
p. 88 Graphic from Alexander et al., 1975, p. 125.
p. 88 Our information about the lack of cost associated with providing a 
window for each worker came from private communication with 
Michael Brill, President, BOSTI, March 1987. 
p. 90 Reprinted with permission from Alexander et al., 1977, pp. 697-99. 
CHAPTER 16 

p. 105 For typical turnover figures, see Bartol, 1983. 
p. 107 It is startling that those who actually build the products could be so 
young. See Hodges, 1986 for some of the original 
p. 109 See Townsend, 1970, p. 64. 
CHAPTER 17 

p. 117 Ken Orr has taken on the issue of "Big M" Methodologies in his 
charming send-up The One Minute Methodology (Orr, 1990). 
p. 119 See Parsons, 1974 for a fascinating relook at the Hawthorne Effect. 
CHAPTER 20 

p. 133 See deBono, 1970. 
p. 135 See Jones, 1981. 
CHAPTER 22 

p. 143 See Thomsett, 1980. 
p. 144 See Robbins, 1977, p. 280. 

NOTES 231


CHAPTER 23 

p. 152 The title of this section on closure was suggested by Nancy 
Meabon's presentation at the Feedback '86 Conference sponsored by 
Ken Orr & Associates in Kansas City, October 1986. 
CHAPTER 24 

p. 162 The granddaddy of business war games is Robert Chase's Hotel and 
Club Management Simulation Exercise, run under the auspices of 
Cornell University's Statler College of Hotel Administration. 
p. 165 The most authoritative source on brainstorming is Edward deBono's 
always fascinating Lateral Thinking: Creativity Step by Step. 
DeBono demonstrates the linked nature of creativity and humor 
through a series of simple exercises. By the time you've finished 
reading the book, you're looking for creative insight every time you 
hear yourself laugh. 
p. 165 DeBono is the master of creativity as an individual exercise. But some 
of the best creative work in business is performed by teams of people 
creating together. The most authoritative source on team creativity (or 
synectics) is William J.J. Gordon. See Gordon, 1961, a readable, 
inspiring, and thoroughly wonderful book. 
CHAPTER 26 

p. 173 During the German occupation of the 1940s, one very active arm of 
the Danish resistance called itself Holgar Dansk. 
CHAPTER 27 

p. 180 Jerry Weinberg's theory of overtime is taken from a conversation 
with him during a joint consult in Fort Collins, September 25, 1990. 
CHAPTER 28 

p. 183 See Deming, 1982, p. 24. 
CHAPTER 30 

p. 195 See Machiavelli, 1985, p. 23 
p. 196 Figure 30.1 is based on private correspondence in 1992 with Jerry W. 
Johnson of the Meninger Business Institute, regarding his work with G. 
Swogger, M.D., on the "Resistance Continuum." 

232 NOTES 

p. 198 See Bridges, 1991 (p. 30) for his insight on celebrating the old. 
p. 199 Graphic based on semantic content from Satir, 1991. 
CHAPTER 31 

p. 204 See also Tom DeMarco's "Human Capital, Unmasked," The New 
York Times, Vol. CXLV, No. 50,397, Section 3, Money & Business 
(April 14, 1996), p. 13. 
CHAPTER 32 

p. 211 Nicholas Negroponte's suggestion was part of his presentation titled 
"Technology Convergence," given at The Camden Conference on 
Telecommunications in Camden, Maine, October 1997. 
CHAPTER 33 

p. 219 In fact, "lean and mean" staffing during key analysis and design 
activities can be hazardous to your health, as illustrated in The 
Deadline: A Novel About Project Management (DeMarco, 1997). 
The main character, Mr. Tompkins, covertly uses a lean staff in 
analysis and design, though he is threatened with execution if he 
misses an impossible deadline. 

Albrecht, 1979. 
Albrecht, AJ. "Measuring Application Development Productivity." 

Proceedings of the Joint SHARE/GUIDE/IBM Application Development 
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Alexander, 1964; 
Alexander, Christopher. Notes on the Synthesis of Form. Cambridge, 
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964. 

Alexander, 1979. 
. The Timeless Way ofBuilding. New York: Oxford University 
Press, 1979. 
Alexander et al., 1975. 
, M. Silverstein, S. Angel, S. Ishikawa, and D. Abrams. The 
Oregon Experiment. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. 
Alexander et al., 1977. 
Alexander, C, S. Ishikawa, and M. Silverstein, with M. Jacobson, I. 
Fisksdahl-King, and S. Angel. A Pattern Language. New York: 
Oxford University Press, 1977. 
Augustine, 1979. 
Augustine, N.R. "Augustine's Laws and Major System Development 
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233 


234 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Bailey and Basili, 1981. 

Bailey, J.W., and V.R. Basili. "A Meta-Model for Software Development 
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Bartol, 1983. 

} 

Bartol, K. "Turnover Among DP Personnel: A Causal Analysis." 
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Boehm, 1981. 
Boehm, Barry W, Software Engineering Economics. Englewood Cliffs, 
N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1981. 

Boehm et al., 1984. 
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Arthur B. Pyster. "A Software Development Environment for 
Improving Productivity." Computer, Vol. 17, No. 6 (June 1984), pp. 
30-42. 
Brady, 1986. 
Brady, J. "A Theory of Productivity in the Creative Process." IEEE 
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Bridges, 1991. 
Bridges, W. Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change. 
Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1991. 
Brill, 1983. 
Brill, Michael, with Stephen T. Margulis, Ellen Konar, and BOSTI. 
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Branner, 1972. 

9 

Brunner, John. The Sheep Look Up. New York: Ballantine Books, 
1972. 

Couger and Zawacki, 1980. 

Couger, J. Daniel, and Robert A. Zawacki. Motivating and Managing 
Computer Personnel. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1980. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 235


Crosby, 1979. 
Crosby, Philip B. Quality Is Free: The Art ofMaking Quality Certain. 
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deBono, 1970. 
deBono, Edward. Lateral Thinking: Creativity Step by Step. New 
York: Harper & Row, 1970. 
DeMarco, 1977. 
DeMarco, Tom. Report on the 1977 Productivity Survey. New York: 
Yourdon, Inc., September 1977. 
DeMarco, 1978. 
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Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1978. 
DeMarco,. 1982. 
. Controlling Software Projects: Management, Measurement 
& Estimation. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1982. 
DeMarco, 1997, 
. the Deadline: A Novel About Project Management. New 
York: Dorset House Publishing, 1997. 
DeMarco and Lister, 1985. 
, and Tim Lister. "Programmer Performance and the Effects of 
the Workplace." Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on 
Software Engineering. New York: Institute of Electrical and 
Electronics Engineers, 1985, pp. 268-72. 
Deming, 1982. 
Deming, W.E. Out of the Crisis. Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts 
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Dittrich, 1984. 
Dittrich, R. "Open-Plan DP Environment Boosts Employee Productivity." 
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Forester, C.S. Mr. Midshipman Hornblower. New York: Pinnacle 
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236 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Gilb, 1977. 
Gilb, Tom. Software Metrics, Cambridge, Mass.: Winthrop Publishers, 
1977. 
Gilbert, 1978. 
Gilbert, Thomas F. Human Competence: Engineering Worthy Performance. 
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Goleman, 1986. 
Goleman, D. "Concentration Is Likened to Euphoric States of Mind." 
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Gordon, 1961. 
Gordon, William J.J. Synectics. New York: Harper & Row, 1961. 
Hodges, 1986. 
Hodges, Parker. "Salary Survey: Small Change for DP Pros." Datamation, 
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Jaynes, 1976. 
Jaynes, Julian. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the 
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Jeffery and Lawrence, 1985. 
Jeffery, D.R., and MJ. Lawrence. "Managing Programming Productivity." 
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1985). 
Jones, 1981. 
Jones, Capers. Programmer Productivity: Issues for the Eighties. 
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Electronics Engineers, 1981. 
Jones, 1986. 
. Programming Productivity. New York: McGraw-Hill, 
1986. 
Kidder, 1981. 
Kidder, Tracy. The Soul of a New Machine. Boston: Atlantic Monthly/
Little, Brown, 1981. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 237


Lawrence, 1981. 
Lawrence, Michael. "Programming Methodology, Organizational Environment, 
and Programming Productivity." Journal ofSystems and Software, 
Vol. 2 (1981), pp. 257-69. 
Lawrence and Jeffery, 1983. 
-, and D.R, Jeffery. "Commercial Programming Productivity— 
An Empirical Look at Intuition." Australian Computer Journal, Vol. 
15, No. 1 (February 1983), p. 28. 
Machiavelli, 1985. 
Machiavelli, Niccolo. The Prince, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. 
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. 
McCue, 1978. 
McCue, Gerald. "IBM's Santa Teresa Laboratory—Architecture Design 
for Program Development." IBM Systems Journal, Vol. 17, No. 1 
(1978), pp. 320-41. 
Mills, 1983. 
Mills, Harlan D. "Software Productivity in the Enterprise." Software 
Productivity. New York: Dorset House Publishing, 1988. 
Morrissey and Wu, 1980. 
Morrissey, J.H., and S.-Y. Wu. "Software Engineering: An Economic 
Perspective." Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Software 
Engineering. New York: Institute of Electrical and Electronics 
Engineers, 1979, pp. 412-22. 
Orr, 1990. 
Orr, Kenneth T. The One Minute Methodology. New York: Dorset 
House Publishing, 1990. 
Parkinson, 1954. 
Parkinson, C. Northcote. Parkinson's Law and Other Studies in Administration. 
New York: Ballantine Books, 1979. 
Parsons, 1974. 
Parsons, H.M. "What Happened at Hawthorne?" Science, Vol. 183 
(March 8, 1974), pp. 922-32. 


238 BIBLIOGRAPHY


Robbins, 1977. 
Robbins, Tom. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. New York: Bantam 
Books, 1977. . 
Sackman et al., 1968. 

Sackman, H., W.J. Erikson, and E.E. Grant. "Exploratory Experimental 
Studies Comparing On-line and Off-line Performance." 
Communications ofthe ACM, Vol. 11, No. 1 (January 1968), pp. 3-11. 

Satir, 1991. 
Satir, V., J. Banmen, J. Gerber, and M. Gomori. The Satir Model: 
Family Therapy and Beyond. Palo Alto, Calif.: Science and Behavior 
Books, 1991. 
Soloway and lyengar, 1986. 
Soloway, Elliot, and Sitharama lyengar, eds. Empirical Studies of Programmers. 
Norwood, N.J.: Ablex Publishing Corp., 1986. 
Tajima and Matsubara, 1984. 
Tajima, D., and T. Matsubara. "Inside the Japanese Software Jjidustry." 
Computer, Vol. 17 (March 1984). 
Thomsett, 1980. 
Thomsett, Rob. People & Project Management. Englewood Cliffs, 
N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980. 
Townsend, 1970. 
Townsend, R. Up the Organization. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 
1970. 


Albrecht, A., 229, 233 

Alexander, C., 81-91,228,230,233 
meta-plan, 83 
organic order theory, 82-84 

Amazon.com example, 211 
Ambrose example, 215-16 
Aptitude tests, 102-3 
Aristotle, 223 { 
Atlantic Systems Guild, 89, 194, 

248 
Auditions,103^i, 148 
Augustine, N., 229, 233 
Automated softwaredevelopment, 

33 

Bailey, J., 229, 234 
Bartol, K., 230,234 
Basili, V., 229, 234 
Bell, A., 69-70 
Bell Laboratories, 67, 110 
Black Team, 129-31,136 
Boehm, B., 26, 228, 229, 234 

CoCoMo productivity metric, 26 
Bonham, B., 170 
Brady, J., 229, 234 
Brainstorming, 11-12,164-65,231 
Branton, R., 169 
Bridges, W., 198, 232, 234 

Brill, M., 229, 230, 234 
Brunner, J., 52, 229, 234 
Bureaucracy, 15ff., 135 
Bureau of Labor Statistics, 112 

Cadre Technologies, 151 

Capability Maturity Model 
(CMM), 187, 188, 189ff. 
Key Process Area (KPA) of, 
187ff., 192 

Change, 194-201 
agents of, 194-95 
continuum, 196-98, 231 
failure and, 201 
Machiavelli's ideas on, 195 
middle management and, 212-14 
modes of,198-200 
organizational learning and, 210 
redesign example and, 211 
resistance to, 196 
responses to, 194,196-98 
Satir model of, 199-200 
security in,200-201 
stages of, 198-200 
uncertainty in, 195-96 

Chaos, 199-200 
Cincinnati Gas & Electric, 127 
Clique, 127-28, 138-39 

239 


240 INDEX 

Closure, 151-53 
CMM: See Capability Maturity 
Model 
Coaching,182-83 
by manager, 182 
by team members, 182-83 
Codd and Date Consulting Group, 
34 
Coding War Games, 44-50, 72, 
162-64, 228, 229 
effects of workplace and, 48-50, 
54-56 
sample time sheet, 64 
Community, 222-26 
Aristotelian politics and, 223-24 
example of, 225-26 
Competition within teams, 181-85, 
213 
Constantine, L., 147 
Cornell University research, 78, 
230,231 
Corporate culture: 
Coding War Games and, 48 
E-Factor and, 67 
effect on productivity, 48 
effect of relocation on, 108-10, 
173-74 
entropy, 99 
goals and, 124-26, 135 
healthy, 31, 144-45, 150-57 
hiringand, 95-97 
paging system and, 40, 75 
of permanence,111-12 
posters and plaques, effect on, 
177-79 
teams and, 121 
telephone and, 72ff. 
turnover and, 105-12 
Cottage industry, 167-68 
Couger, J., 234 
Creativity, 178 
Crosby, P., 22, 228, 235 
Cubicles, 40, 79, 86, 136 

DarthVader example, 192 
Data General, 17, 228 
Deadlines,11-12, 25, 29, 34, 232 
phony,137-38 
resources and, 20 
staffing and, 218-19 
deBono,E., 133,230,231,235 
DeMarco, T., 198, 227, 228, 229, 
232,235,248 
anecdotes, 10-11, 13, 34, 43, 59, 
67,71-72, 110,125,137, 
144^5, 167,184, 188,201, 
215-16,221,222 
DeMarco/Lister Effect, 56 
Deming, W, 183-84, 231, 235 
pride of workmanship and, 
183-84 
Deterministic system, 113-14 
Digital Equipment Corp., 147 
Dittrich, R., 53,229, 235 
Documentation, 116 
Downsizing, 207-8 
Dress code, 97-98, 157 
DuPont, 118, 127 

E-Factor, 66-67, 171 
EG&G, 112 
E-mail system, 73-74 
Environment, office: 
characteristics of ideal, 81-91 
costs of, 51-59 
creative, 78 
enclosed area, 75-80 
factors correlated to performance, 
49-50,179 
floor plans and, 39^0, 52, 56, 
79, 86-87, 136 
flow and, 63-68 
productive, 146 
windows in, 40,87-88 
Environmental Factor, 66-67, 171 
ESS 1 project relocation, 110 
Estimating methods, 12 


INDEX 241


Jeffery-Lawrence data on,
26-28, 228,236-37


FedEx example, 211 
Fellows, 168, 170 
Floor plans, office, 39-40, 76 
cubicles, 40, 86, 136 
open plan, 52, 79 
patterns of design, 84-90 
people density and, 56 
possible arrangements, 87 
Flow, 63-68 
telephone and, 69 
Foreign element, 199 
Forester, C., 95, 235 
Fujitsu, 23, 161 
Furniture layouts, 87 
Furniture Police, xi, 37-41,76, 136 

General Electric, 127, 144 
Getaway ploy, 57, 145-47, 165-66 
Gilb, T., 59, 229, 236 
Gilbert, T., 229, 236 
Gilb'sLaw,59 
Goleman, D., 229, 236 
Gordon, W., 231,236 
Gurus, 168 

Hawthorne Effect, 119-20, 160, 
230 
Hewlett-Packard, 23, 111 
High-tech illusion, 5-6, 32, 33,119 
Hiring, 95-97 
aptitude tests for, 102-3 
auditions and, 103-^t, 148 
interview for, 100-104 
terminating and, 113 
Hitachi Software, 23, 112 
Hodges, P., 230, 236 
Holgar Dansk, xi, 172-7'4, 231 
Hornblower, H., 95, 96, 235 
Human capital, 202-8,210,221,224 
Humphrey, W., 187, 188, 199 

IBM, 161 
workplace study, 53-54, 62, 229 
Interrupt-free time, 49, 63-67, 75 
telephone and, 72ff. 
Intrapreneurs, 168,169 
Inversion, 133, 165 
Iterative design, 8 
lyengar, S., 227, 238 

Jaynes, J., 230, 236 
Jeffery, R., 26-29,228,229,236,237 
Job interview, 100-104 
Job satisfaction, 60, 105-12, 
151-56 
Joel, B., 15-16, 228 
Johnson, J., 196, 197,231 
Jones, C., 28, 135, 227, 228, 229, 
230,236 

Karlstrom, K., 227 
Ketchledge, R., 110 
Key Process Area (KPA), 187ff., 
192 
Kidder, T., 228, 236 

Laetrile,30-34 
Language, effect on productivity, 
32-33, 47 
Lawrence, ML, 26-29,228,229, 
236,237 
Leadership, 155, 178 
posters, 178 
Lister, T., 227, 228, 229, 235, 248 
anecdotes, 9-10,18,30-31, 
38-39, 57, 73-74, 98, 104, 134, 
145^6, 189, 196,201,210 
Loyalty, 178 

Machiavelli, N., 195, 231, 237 
Maginot Line example, 209 
Management, 178, 181-82, 183-84 
See also Management sin; The 
Management Team; Managers 


242 INDEX 

Aristotelian politics and, 223-24 
defensive, 133-35, 144 
definition, 9, 34, 96 
folklore, xiii, 42 
learning and, 213-14 
by objectives (MBO), 183-84 
Seven Sirens of, 31-34 
Spanish Theory, 14-18 
style, 7-9 
thermodynamic law of, 99 
Management sin, 215-21 
of fragmentation of time, 219-20 
of overstaffmg, 217-19 
of status meetings, 215-17 
Management Team, The, 212-13 
Managers: 
born versus made, 95-96 
communicationamong,212-14 
community and, 222 
competition, approach to, 18Iff., 
213 
deadlines and, 138 
disorder and, 159 
experience and, 210 
hysterical optimism of, 124 
middle, 212-14 
natural authority and, 148-49 
open kimono, 143-49, 159 
overtime and, 180 
personnel hiring, 95-97 
productivity and, 32 
teamicide and, 213 
teams and, 128ff., 181ff., 212-13 
in white space, 213-14 
Mao Tse-tung, 120 
Matsubara, T., x, 22, 228, 238 
Mazzucchelli, L., 151 
MBO: See Management by objectives 
McCue, G., 53-54, 62, 229, 237 
McMenamin, S., ix, x, 168, 194 
Meabon, N., 231 

Measurement schemes: 
of individual performance, 
45^6, 61,183 
of productivity,52-53,58-61, 
229 
of workplace costs, 51-59 
Medici family, 195 
Meetings,215-17 
as ceremony, 216, 217 
Menninger Business Institute, 196, 
231 
Meta-plan, for facility design, 83 
Methodology, 8, 114-20, 135 
Big-M, 186 
Methods, standardized, 116, 118 
convergence of, 118 
survey, 196 
MicroSage Computer Systems, 
170 
Mills, H., 48, 229, 237 
Morrissey, J., 228, 237 
Motivation, worker, xi, 28-29, 60, 
117 
posters and plaques for, 177-79 
Mushet, M., 169 

Negroponte, N., 211, 232 
New South Wales data, 26-29, 228 
Noise, effect on productivity, 37, 
40,43,49-57, 75-80, 91,136 
Cornell research on, 72, 230 
people density and, 56-57 
telephone, 49, 72 
work modes and, 62-68 

Office environment: See 
Environment, office 
Open office plan, 52, 79 
Organic order, 82-84 
Organizational learning, 209-14 
employee turnover and, 209-11 
experience and,209-11 


INDEX 243


via management communication, 
211-13 
middle management and, 212-14 
redesign example, 211 
in white space, 213-14 
Orr,K., 117, 152,230, 231,237 
Overstaffing,217-19 
Overtime, 13-18,42-43,179^80,231 
negative impact of, 179-80 
teamicide and, 179-80 
time accounting and, 64-65 

Pacific Bell, 112 
Page-Jones, M., ix-x 
Paging system, 40, 75, 173 
Paperwork, 116, 135 
Parkinson, C, 228, 237 
Parkinson's Law, 23, 24-29, 145, 
171,228 
Parsons, H., 230, 237 
Partitioned workspace, 40, 79, 86, 
136 
Patterns, for office design, 84-90 
Peer review, 118 
People Store, 9-10 
Personnel,205-7 
See also Human capital 
investment in, 204-8 
retention of, 210 
turnover,205-8,210-11, 224 
Pilot project, 160-62 
Politics, Aristotelian, 223-24 
Popcorn standard, 98-99 
Portfolio, 101-2 
Prideful workmanship, 178 
Privacy, effect on productivity, 40, 
54-55, 75-80, 89-90 
Process improvement programs, 
186-93 
Big-M methodologies, 186 
history of, 186-87 
staff turnover and, 224 
Production environment, 7 

Productivity: 
See also Privacy, effect on productivity 
definition of, 14, 17 
estimating and, 26-29 
factors,31-34,44-50, 229 
fragmentation of time and, 
219-20 
improvement, 31-34 
Japanese, 22 
languages and, 32-33,47 
Lawrence-Jeffery studies, 26-29 
Louise and Ralph example, 
205-6 
measurement of,26-29,45-50, 
52-53, 58-61, 229 
noise, effect on, 37,40,43, 
49-57, 62-68, 72, 75-80, 91, 
136,230 
overtime and, 13-18,42-43 
pilot project and, 160-62 
programmer,27-28 
relocation and, 110 
of software industry, 32 
technology and, 3-6, 31-32 
turnoverand, 205-6 
windows and, 40, 87-88 
Product quality, 137, 151 
defined, 17 
Japanese, 22, 23 
MTBFand, 21 
resources and, 20 
schedules and, 11-12, 17-23, 
26-29, 34 
self-esteemand,19-20, 144-^5 
windowed office space and, 40 
workspace quality and, 55-57 
Professional, as code word, 98-99, 
157 
Profit-and-loss example, 202-3 
Project: 
catalyst, 10-11 
development environment, 7-8 


244 INDEX 

personnel, 9-10,96, 148, 227 
pilot, 160-62 
politics, 4, 217-19 
risk and,189-90,191ff. 
schedules, 11-12, 17-18, 19-23, 
25-29 
sociology, 4, 8,103 
staffing plan, 217-19, 232 
surveys,3-4, 26-29,44-50, 72, 
162-64, 227 
tournament, 163-64 

Quality, 178 
CMM and, 190 
cult of, 151-52 
motivation and, 178 
of products, 19-20, 23, 137, 
144-45, 178 
of workspace, 37ff., 55-57 
of work time,42-43, 59, 64-68, 
74, 136-37 

Reader's Digest, 111 
Resistance-to-Change Continuum, 
196-98,231 
Risk, 189-90, 19Iff. 
Robbins, T., 144, 230, 238 
Robertson, J., x 
Robertson, S., x, 214 

Sackman, H., 229, 238 
Salary: 
programmer performance and, 47 
teamicide and, 183 
workspace cost and, 51-52 
Santa Teresa study, 53-54, 62, 229 
Satir, V., 199-200, 232, 238 
Satir change model, 199 
Schedules, 11-12, 17-18 
Self-esteem, and product quality, 
19-20, 144-45 
Ski trip example, 201 
Skunkworks project, 147 

Software backlog, 33 
Software Engineering Institute 
(SEI), 186-87,188, 190, 192 
Soloway, E., 227, 238 
Southern California Edison, 112 
Southern Company Services, 161, 
169 
Spanish Theory of Management, 
14-18 
Staffing: See Personnel; Project 
staffing plan 
Standardization: 
of methods, 7,116, 187-88 
of products, 161, 187 
Status quo, and change model, 198ff. 
Survey of development projects, 
3-4 
Coding War Games, 44-50, 72, 
162-64, 228 
Lawrence-Jeffery data, 26—29 
Swogger,E.,231 
System, all-human, 113 

Tajima, D., 22, 228, 238 
Team, 121ff., 179-80, 181-85, 213 
Black, 129-31 
catalyst, 11 
as choir, 185 
competition within, 181-85, 213 
elite, 153-54 
flexibility of, 179 
formation,26,132-39, 150-56 
goals and, 124-26 
heterogeneity of, 156, 180 
hiring, 103^1 
interactions, 136-37, 183 
jelled, 123-29, 132-35, 143ff., 
149, 156, 179, 182,213 
member selection, 96, 148, 174 
purpose, 126 
quality and, 23, 144-45, 178 
sociology, 8, 147-48 
as sports metaphor for, 184-85 


INDEX 245


uniformity of, 156,180 
workspace,89-90, 136 
Teamicide,xi, 132-39, 177-80, 
183-84,213, 220 
competition and, 183-184 
overtime and, 179-80 
performance measurement and, 183 
time fragmentation and, 220 
Technology, 32 
Telephone, xii, 69ff., 173 
effect on productivity, 49 
ethic, 72ff. 
interruption by,xii, 63-64 
Termination, 113 
Thomis, W., 67 
Thomsett, R., 143, 230, 238 
Time accounting, 64-65 
Timeless Way of Building, 81-91 
Time sheet, 64 
Townsend, R., 109,230, 238 
Training, 108, 112, 118, 165 
Turnover, worker, 105-12, 205—7, 
210-11, 224 
costs of, 105-8; 
promoting and, 107 
teams and, 127 

Uniformity, corporation's need for, 
96-97,99,156 
Uninterrupted hours, 63-67, 72-75 

Voice-mail system, xii, 73 

Wall Street and staffing policies, 
207-8 
War games, 162-64 
See also Coding War Games 
Weinberg,!., 180, 231 
Weinberg, S., 34 
White space example, 213-14 
Wiener, J., 144 
Windowed office space, 39^0, 
87-88,228 

Women on teams, 156 
Workaholics, 16 
Workers, as interchangeable parts, 
7, 108 
Workplace: 
characteristics of ideal, 81-91 
cleanliness, 38 
community, 222-26 
costs, 51-59 
decor, 76-77 
design, 37, 40, 75-80 
indoor versus outdoor, 89 
noise, 37, 43,49-57,62-68, 
75-80, 91, 136 
privacy, 37, 40, 54-55, 75-80, 
89-90 
quality and product quality, 
55-61 
Work to rule, 117 
Work time, 42, 59 
accounting system, 64-65 
brain time, 62-68 
quality, 42ff., 74, 136-37 
time sheet example, 64 
work modes, 62 
Wu, S., 228, 237 

Xerox Corp., 153 

Zawacki, R., 234 


Praise for the First Edition O/PEOPLEWARE 

"DeMarco and Lister are, at once, entertaining story tellers and astute 
observers of the project management scene." 

— John H. Taylor, E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. ". 
. . fun to read because the authors illustrate their analyses and solutions 
with war stories drawn from their consulting experience. But this well-
researched book is also persuasive because its advice is backed up by firm 
scholarship." —PC World 

"... the authors buttress their assertions with empirical data collected from studies 
involving some 900 programmers and analysts. ... All of the chapters 
contain insights and novel approaches that will make readers and managers 
look at important issues from a new vantage point.... Its messages are important, 
and the book deserves a place on the shelf of every software manager 
and every software management consultant." —T. Capers Jones 

"Lister and [DeMarco] savagely destroy a sizeable chunk of received wisdom, 
using by turns well-picked example, epigrammatic darts, careful reasoning and 
even data. ... even if you disagree with what DeMarco and Lister say, you 
will enjoy how they say it, and you will go away thinking. Get the book and read 
it. Then give it to your manager. Or, if you dare, your subordinates." 

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"... casts a new light on human behavior in development projects." 

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"... their insights are penetrating. The overall effect is wisdom." 

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i 

Also by TOM DEMARCO and TIMOTHY LISTER 

The Deadline: A Novel About Project Management 

by Tom DeMarco 

ISBN: 0-932633-39-0 Copyright .1997 320 pages, softcover 

Productive Teams: A Video 

featuring Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister 

ISBN: 0-932633-30-7 Copyright .1994 VMS or PAL 60 minutes 

Software State-of-the-Art: Selected Papers 

edited by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister 

ISBN: 0-932633-14-5 Copyright .1990 584 pages, hardcover 

Why Does Software Cost So Much? And Other Puzzles of the Information 
Age by Tom DeMarco 
ISBN: 0-932633-34-X Copyright .1995 248 pages, softcover 

Dorset House Publishing 

353 West 12th Street New York, NY 10014 USA
1 -800-342-6657 212-620-4053 fax: 212-727-1044
dhpubco @ aol.com www.dorsethouse.com




ABOUT THE AUTHORS



TOM DEMARCO and TIMOTHY LISTER 
are principals of the Atlantic Systems 
Guild (www.atlsysguild.com), 
a New York-and London-based 
consulting firm. Together, they 
have lectured, written, and consulted 
internationally since 1979 on 
topics in estimating and productivity, 
management, and corporate 
culture. 

TOM DEMARCO has written six books in 
all, including The Deadline: A Novel about 
Project Management [Dorset House, 1997]. 
He was the recipient of the 1986 J.-D. 
Warnier Prize for "lifetime contribution to 
the information sciences." His consulting 
practice is focused mostly on project management 
and method. Tom lives in 
Camden, Maine. 


TIMOTHY LISTER, based in Manhattan, divides 
his time between consulting, teaching, and 
writing, mostly in the area of risk management 
for software organizations and projects. 
Tim also negotiates software disputes for the 
American Arbitration Association and participates 
on the Airlie Council of the DoD's 
Software Program Manager's Network. 

PHOTO CREDITS: 

top: Charles Betz 
middle: Hein van Steenis 
bottom: James Robertson