RESOURCES FOR READERS

On this page, and another one, labeled “Notes and Leftovers” I’ve assembled a collection of thoughts, leftovers and other interesting tidbits from the writing (and post-writing) of the book. Writing, for me, appears to follow a process that sort of looks like my dad’s old carve-an-elephant joke: “How do you carve an elephant made of marble? You take a block of marble and chisel away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant.”

BTW, if you have enjoyed the book, please do leave a review on Amazon!

Thanks for being part of making better workplaces.

Jack Skeels

(ALSO: Please accept my apology as I am still cleaning up the “Notes” page. Lots of moving pieces in writing a book, and I feel bad that I didn’t get this cleaned up sooner.)

This Page

Links and References

The Other Page

Notes and Leftovers

Book Cover JPEG

INTRODUCTION AND ORIGINS

End Notes & Resources

  1. The working title of that book was How to Run a F**king Agency, by the Guy Whom You Said Could Not Run an Agency. Clearly, I was not unhinged at all.
  2. Mintzberg, Henry; Managers, not MBAs: a hard look at the soft practice of managing and management development, 2004, Berrett-Koehler Publishers in English – 1st ed.
  3. The name of our company is a bit of a misnomer as we don’t “do” agile really; nor do we only work with agencies. It sounded catchy, and the domain was available. I tell myself that while there are better names, there are also worse ones.
  4. The Why Moment also embodies many of the great differences between Japanese and Western management styles and is called Ba, which (roughly) means “a shared place.” Ikujiro Nonaka, “A Dynamic Theory of Organizational Knowledge Creation,” Organization Science 5, no. 1 (February 1994).
  5. The name agency really means an organization in service of many clients, which is a situation many departments and teams in non-agencies find themselves in these days as organizational silos are broken down by the rapid demands of business.
    1. A more detailed rationale and many insightful ideas can be found in the microeconomic field of “Agency Theory” where buyer-seller relationships are deconstructed into what is known as the “principal-agent problem”, an asymmetric form of relationship where the highly-specialized seller (agent) often has one or more advantages over the buyer.
  6. My writings on Agile are mostly on Medium.com (https://medium.com/@jackskeels) but you can also find a more full selection on this book’s online resources page: https://unmanagedbook.com/resources (Here is a selection of my writings, including some client cases, and articles published in trade press)
    1. https://jackskeels.medium.com/the-elusive-search-for-organizational-agile-ed33af41fb02
    2. https://jackskeels.medium.com/how-marketing-is-destroying-agile-a53933080ba4
    3. https://jackskeels.medium.com/will-management-succeed-at-killing-agile-7126e8d16843
    4. https://medium.com/swlh/why-you-should-probably-never-say-agile-df001a5bc22c
    5. https://jackskeels.medium.com/calming-agency-chaos-by-un-managing-307f50b9f48d
    6. https://agencyagile.com/a-better-agile-for-agencies-at-helloworld/
    7. https://agencyagile.com/why-its-hard-to-make-agile-work/
    8. https://agencyagile.com/why-we-threw-our-hierarchical-org-chart-down-the-waterfall/
    9. https://agencyagile.com/ming-chan-in-forbes-benefits-of-using-agile-in-an-agency/
    10. Also, I would refer you to the lone Agile book on our AgencyAgile bookshelf, by Larman and Vodde. https://agencyagile.com/bookshelf/

SECTION 1 – MANAGERS, ORGANIZATIONS, AND METRICS

End Notes & Resources:

  1. Coase, Ronald Harry. The Nature of the Firm (London: Macmillan Education UK, 1995).
  2. Geometric growth here refers to a multiplicative relationship of some form; in this case, manager-to-manager coordination for four managers is more than twice as costly as it was for just two managers, something closer to four times more costly, multiplication rather than addition.
  3. AgencyAgile gathered this data in a 2019 client forum by asking clients how much productivity they gained by adopting better techniques.
  4. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1991/coase/facts/
    • Shortly after I left RAND, a couple of researchers I had been working with received the Nobel Peace Prize for their climate modeling, which sadly, was not the project I had helped them with. But one of them, Rob Lempert, gave me a serving platter as a wedding gift within months of that, which I still have and cherish. Years later, I went to look at the list of Nobel prize winners from RAND, and to my great surprise (and pleasure), Ronald Coase was listed. He had worked their briefly in the 1950’s I believe.
  5. I use the term Software Agile to denote the specific methods and applications of this concept to software development. The word agile (note the lower case a) is used more broadly in business to characterize change initiatives aimed at agility, innovation, etc., and as such is a bit of a platitude, rather than a practice.
  6. Software Agile was designed to solve the problems of long-term, dedicated teams working on one large project.
  7. See https://agilemanifesto.org/ © 2001, the cited authors.
  8. From Rico, David F., Hasan H. Sayani, and Saya Sone. The business value of agile software methods: maximizing ROI with just-in-time processes and docu- mentation. (Fort Lauderdale: J. Ross Publishing, 2009).
  9. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=manager&year_ start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3
  10. https://fashion-history.lovetoknow.com/fashion-history-eras/ history-needles-sewing
  11. From Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021) 18–19, citing from Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
  12. S. E. Scullen, M. K. Mount, and M. Goff, “Understanding the Latent Structure of Job Performance Ratings,” Journal of Applied Psychology 85, no. 6 (2000): 956–970.
  13. Adapted from my original article published in MediaPost Agency Daily, Dec 17, 2017, How Good (Or Not) Are Your Agency Managers?
  1. Mintzberg, Henry. “Structure in 5’s: A Synthesis of the Research on Organization Design.” Management Science 26, no. 3 (1980): 322–341.
    • I do not feel that Mintzberg’s recent work moves our understanding of ad hoc organizations forward correctly. TBH, I was concerned when I learned of his new book, as we were in late stages of edits on my book. He renamed the ad hoc organization to be the “Project Organization,” which coincidentally I had done as well, but many of his “insights” (ex:  the coordinator is the hardest-working person) are not correct for the multi-managed/matrixed organizations that we refer to in the book.
  2. Maslow, Abraham H. Maslow on Management. John Wiley & Sons, 1998.
  3. It is important, when quoting scientists and others from the early twentieth century to remain mindful that although some of their findings remain rele- vant and useful today, others have become dated and, in many cases, wholly inappropriate. Maslow, for example, held a strong position on eugenics, which influenced the development of his principles regarding how relative (often experiential) superiority affect group dynamics.
  4. Tost, Leigh Plunkett, Francesca Gino, and Richard P. Larrick. “When power makes others speechless: The negative impact of leader power on team performance.” Academy of Management journal 56, no. 5 (2013): 1465–1486.
  5. From RAND’s original report on the Delphi Technique for improving group decision-making. Helmer, Olaf. “Analysis of the future: The Delphi method.” (1967). https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/AD0649640.pdf
  6. Likert was an under-appreciated genius, in my opinion, on the scale of Ronald Coase. A good starting point is this book: Likert, Rensis. New Patterns of Management (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1961).
  7. Buckingham, Marcus, and Ashley Goodall, “Reinventing Performance Management,” Harvard Business Review 93, no. 4 (2015): 40–50.
  8. If you are an Agile practitioner, you now probably realize that the so-called fifteen-minute stand-up rule—that the stand-up should be limited to a fifteen-minutes duration—is complete BS. The stand-up should always take as long as is needed because it is the best way to have those conversations.

SECTION 2 – UNDERSTANDING AND OPPORTUNITY

End Notes & Resources:

  1. Chaddad, Fabio. “Both Market and Hierarchy: Understanding the Hybrid Nature of Cooperatives” (International Workshop, Rural Cooperation in the 21st Century: Lessons from the Past, Pathways to the Future, Israel, 2009).
  2. Paul S. Martin, Twilight of the Mammoths: Ice Age Extinctions and the Rewilding of America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
  3. Saavedra, R., Earley, P. C., & Van Dyne, L. (1993). Complex interdependence in task-performing groups. Journal of Applied Psychology, 78(1), 61–72. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.78.1.61
  4. As a side note, the variability of the machines contributed to the poor quality: the complexity of fitting a car together meant that any slight deviation in a given part might impact whether other parts would fit later on.
  5. To this day, I’m sure that I could have gotten through that Multivariate Calculus class in undergrad if I had only taken it like four more times; the people who did well in it sounded like they were from another planet when they talked about the assignments.
  6. Sandra Seagal and David Horne, An Introduction to Human Dynamics (Human Dynamics International, 1992).
  7. We’ve modified Seagal’s model slightly and also renamed each style and dropped dated, loaded terminology to be more effective when we’re teaching the this topic. We call it mVAK (or modified VAK), as her terminology was not really workplace friendly as it included defining people as “mental” or “emotional,” both of which can carry some serious pejorative baggage.
  8. More than one executive with decades experience at RAND told me this, so I take it as fact, despite not being able to find any published research on the topic.
  9. This shows up in workplace survey data like the 2015 Campaign.us survey that showed decreased engagement in more-junior workers. https://web. archive.org/web/20150925004928/https://www.campaignlive.com/article/ survey-70-employees-low-morale-ad-companies-job-hunting/1364561
  10. A good place to start: Gagné, Marylène, and Edward L. Deci. “Self‐determi- nation theory and work motivation.” Journal of Organizational behavior 26, no. 4 (2005): 331–362.
  11. Wikipedia lists over 170 cognitive biases, but a more authoritative source might be: Jonathan Barron, Thinking and Deciding (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2023).

SECTION 3 – SCOPE AND ALIGNMENT

End Notes & Resources:

  1. You can beat this number through method, which is what we teach, but also by reducing project complexity. If your projects are very routine and famil- iar, using the same tools for the same problems and with an established and tested (repeatable) process, your rework rate should be much lower. But then that would also indicate your work is somewhere between the corners on our work-styles triangle, more routine or formulaic, containing significant prod- uct- or process-driven attributes.
  2. Credit for these goes to the Standish Group, an amazing research organiza- tion that studies project success rates and factors that drive them, and their biannual Chaos Report. www.standishgroup.com
  3. You can earn certificates and accreditations in project management, but unlike medical or accounting professions, project managers are not governed by any regulations and rarely receive best practices guidance.
  4. In many ways, project management drew its techniques from Taylorism, including the prodigious use of time standards and the manager as the controller.
  5. A video of this narrative can be found on our resources page, with the title The Ignorance Gap. https://unmanagedbook.com/resources
  6. An AgencyAgile study, published by Digiday, showed that project failure rates increase with the newness of technology and technique. https://agencyagile. com/agency-research-digidays-the-hidden-cost-of-agency-freelancers- study-summary/
  7. The Standish Group has noted that almost 60% of the causes of projects being challenged or failed were directly connected to problems of scope and alignment between all of the parties involved: The Chaos Report, 2014; The Standish Group; p. 9.
  8. The research field of LEC (Law, Economics, and Contracting) includes fascinating work on the “enforceable bounds of contracts,” which, in essence, suggests that contracts are rarely as detailed as they might be because of a diminishing return on that detail versus the benefits of simply agreeing on a contract. This is even more true in the world of one-off projects.
  9. On the client side, the project may have finally been approved after years of budget requests and political jockeying. The managers who “own” the project may have been better off if the project had not been funded.
  10. In case you’re curious why we have such great stories, it is because we only do our work with live projects. It is the only type of training that actually works and is sustainable after the trainer leaves.
  11. This is another of the lessons that was incorporated into Software Agile: it can be better to have the team just define and build a piece of scope and validate it afterward than spend weeks or months writing a “complete scope” that nobody understands and is often incorrect.
  12. One of many on this topic: March, James G., and Zur Shapira. “Managerial perspectives on risk and risk taking.” Management science 33, no. 11 (1987): 1404–1418.
  13. This roughly corresponds to a term used in management research called VUCA, which stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.
  14. Moløkken-Østvold, Kjetil, and Magne Jørgensen. “Group processes in software effort estimation.” Empirical Software Engineering 9, no. 4 (2004): 315–334.
  15. Moløkken, Kjetil, and Magne Jørgensen. “Expert estimation of web-develop- ment projects: are software professionals in technical roles more optimistic than those in non-technical roles?” Empirical Software Engineering 10 (2005): 7–30.
  16. https://unmanagedbook.com/resources
    • This note refers to the large roadmap wall one of our clients did during a training. (Below)
  17. To the degree that this is true, it may also contribute to some of the myopia around requirements documents. If an RM produces a document and then asks for another in-the-know person to review it, they will probably get positive feedback, despite it being highly useless for someone who has no understanding of the project.
  18. These are from comments that we have collected, postevent, in a retrospective with the vendor/agency and (usually) client.
  19. We’ve also seen clients get less demanding of the team once a face has been put to it.
  20. Brooks, Frederick P. “The Mythical Man-Month.” Datamation 20, no. 12 (1974): 44–52.

 

 

SECTION 4 – PRODUCTIVE FLOW

End Notes & Resources:

  1. In well-run Software Agile projects, it is largely the only meeting in the day that has any potential managerial involvement. The rest of the day? Go.
  2. Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011).
    • I must also recommend a simply inspiring book, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds, by Michael Lewis (the Moneyball author)
  3. The “systems” reflect two different processes but do not correspond to any specific physical organization of, or location within, the brain.
  4. Levitin, Daniel J. The organized mind: Thinking straight in the age of information overload. Penguin, 2014.
  5. Mark, Gloria, Victor M. Gonzalez, and Justin Harris. “No task left behind? Examining the nature of fragmented work.” In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, pp. 321–330. 2005.
  6. Murray, Susan L., and Zafar Khan. “Impact of interruptions on white collar workers.” Engineering Management Journal 26, no. 4 (2014): 23–28.

SECTION 5 – LEADERSHIP

End Notes & Resources:

  1. This list was inspired by a book I highly recommend, John Mackey and Rajendra Sisodia, Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2014).
  2. In a traditional workplace, everyone has just one manager—that’s why draw- ing a pyramid is actually accurate. It is called the manager’s span of control and is often stated as a ratio: “most managers have six employees, which results in a 1:6 span of control.”
  3. In case you’re wondering, I do think there are excellent DEI consultants out there, but their excellence comes from their approach: they embed in the organization so they can manage behaviors, achieving similar effects to what I describe here. The futility of the shame-based approach was recently noted by researchers Mahzarin Banaji and Frank Dobbin, in their Wall Street Journal article, “Why DEI Training Doesn’t Work—and How to Fix It”; September 12, 2023; https://www.wsj.com/business/c-suite/ dei-training-hr-business-acd23e8b
  4. Romano, Nicholas C., and Jay F. Nunamaker. “Meeting analysis: Findings from research and practice.” In Proceedings of the 34th annual Hawaii interna- tional conference on system sciences, pp. 13-pp. IEEE, 2001.
  5. I made a few fun podcasts with my writing partner Steve Prentice on this topic, one of which was I Hate Your Stupid Meeting, which you can find on www.TheArtof.Management
  6. My article, Inhuman Trafficking, (MediaPost, May 2015) where the word trafficking refers to the process (often automated) of scheduling workers in a very fragmented way, as if context switching and multi-allocation had no dehumanizing effect. https://agencyagile.com/inhuman-trafficking/
  7. Digital Taylorism, by the staff of The Economist. Sept 2015. https://www.econ- omist.com/business/2015/09/10/digital-taylorism
  8. The correct question would be, “How much did we (managers) underestimate Josh’s work this week?”
  9. For a more thorough dissection of this topic, I recommend the two books, Abolishing Performance Appraisals (Coens, Tom, and Mary Jenkins. Abolishing performance appraisals: Why they backfire and what to do instead. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2000) and Pyramids are Tombs by Joe Phelps, a former client (and mentor) of mine (Phelps, Joe. Pyramids Are Tombs: Yesterday’s Corporate Structure, Like the 20th Century, Is History. IMC Pub., 2002).
  10. https://slack.com/blog/news/future-of-work-research-summer-2023
  11. This refers to the sociological phenomenon where one broken window in a neighborhood, left unrepaired, will lead to more broken windows because it signals that nobody cares. From: Wilson, James Q., and George L. Kelling. “Broken windows.” Atlantic monthly 249, no. 3 (1982): 29–38.
  12. https://www.entrepreneur.com/leadership/ you-can-never-elude-the-shark-but-you-can-learn-to-swim/278146
  13. To be honest, when I first read this book, I wished I had written it. It has its challenges in the clients we’ve worked with. Gino Wickman, Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business (Dallas: BenBella Books, Inc., 2012).
    • I don’t mean that as an endorsement of the book.  I think it is a bit simplistic and management-centric for project-driven organizations, often encouraging more managing and more formal managerial structures.
  14. I made this sort of approach the subject of a keynote that I did for an industry group several years ago. Look for Values Are Not Enough: The Keys to Unlocking Enduring Agency Transformation, which you can find on our on our online resources page. https://unmanagedbook.com/resources

SECTION 6 – THE INGENIOUS MANAGER

End Notes & Resources:

  1. Jack Rosenberg et al., Body, Self, and Soul: Sustaining Integration (Atlanta: Humanics Limited, 1989). Also, you can find the two lists (Good Father and Good Mother) reproduced on websites like this: https://stillinthestream. com/2022/01/22/good-parent-messages/
    • Jack was my first real therapist, back in the early 1990’s, and while he wasn’t ultimately the great fit that I was looking for, he had a knack for bringing ideas together in useful ways. Also, my appointment was right after the actor Gary Shandling’s, so I would often see him slinking out(!) of Jack’s office at the end of his session.
  2. David R. Hawkins, Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender (Carlsbad: Hay House Inc., 2014) 20–28.
  3. Marliee Adams, Change Your Questions, Change Your Life (Oakland: Berrett- Koehler Publishers, 2009).
  4. Schein, Edgar H., and Peter A. Schein. Humble inquiry: The gentle art of asking instead of telling. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2021.