The Corporate Culture of Meetings...

Every time I hear another architect describe their employer's work culture as collaborative, I have come to learn that this is really a polite way of saying they work in a meeting-oriented culture...



Bet you didn't know that collaborative cultures tend to cause people to work harder but don't necessarily have better business outcomes.

Meetings are one of the most frequent ways that overtime organizations waste the time of their most essential human resources. Another way is that workers tend to drop their interrupt discipline during daylight hours, knowing that their peers will be working long into the night as they feel to interrupt them willy-nilly during "normal" working hours.

In many cultures, meetings aren't just a problem, but an obsession. Meetings in many companies account for nearly a third of all people's time. To make matters worse, meetings are not only too frequent but also have way too many people. Have you had a day with multiple meetings where the smallest in attendance was still over a dozen? Doesn't this remind you of what it feels like to be part of MC Hammer's entourage...



The best and biggest waste of time is when a new person attends. We spend a lot of time bringing this person up to speed while making dozens of people endure the same material they have seen at least a dozen times.

All of these meetings cause people to become overworked and do more overtime than they should. Many people are of the mindset that overtime only impacts the employee and not the company since the company isn't paying additional for the time wasted, but nothing could be further from the truth.

Think about a business practice where there is a tendency to waste normal workday hours? Don't you think that this time could be better used than in meetings? Ask yourself why do the basic hygienic acts of management to reduce daytime waste are for some reason suspended?

A culture that is wildly successful will attempt to achieve balance for all involved. It is common sense that people think better when they aren't tired and therefore it is in management's best interest to keep people fresh.

If you want to stump a CIO, ask him/her what would they do if overtime were forbidden and they still had to make a schedule? Until your enterprise can answer this fundamental question, there is no hope in either truly obtaining IT efficiency nor in achieving sustained competitive advantage...

Does cutting headcount increase or reduce efficiency?

I find it fascinating to walk into organizations who in the name of efficiency have cut back on junior staff while also watching people who make six figures spending lots of time at the copier...



Expense reduction should never result in pushing clerical work upward (usually to managers or to knowledge workers). I would think it would be more efficient and cost saving if a company introduced even a few gofers. When a low-level employee off-loads someone who makes four times as much, the organization is a big winner.

Why do we classify people who handle clerical tasks as overhead? The obsession in eliminating anything that is labeled as overhead has resulted in many organizations where high-priced knowledge workers spend as much as a quarter of their time being their own overhead. Is this an economy?

The absence of low-level support becomes even more important when knowledge workers are arrayed in team. Companies that are maintaining competitive advantage in this new economy have figured out how to better leverage knowledge workers and it aint by giving them more clerical tasks...

Thoughts on Outsourcing: Should I admit this in public?

In the past, I have been somewhat hostile to IT outsourcing and have pointed out numerous observations as to why it continuously fails. Historically, IT outsourcing at best has resulted in mediocrity due to lack of talent offshore. Increasingly, IT outsourcing is failing due to the inability of onshore Americans to practice the discipline of saying no...



As an Architect and Agilist, I understand the value proposition of finding and fixing faults early in the lifecycle but for some strange reason have been blissfully ignorant in applying these principles until now. What could be earlier in the lifecycle that the actions taken by the onshore staff of an IT outsourcing firm?

Many developers in India, Sri Lanka and other IT outsourcing destinations sit back and wonder why they are always put into situations that require heroics and almost always setup to fail. In their minds, they may be led to believe that it is the client who is demanding. I think this perspective is inaccurate and somewhat dishonest.

Consider for a moment that a client can and should ask for anything and everything under the sun. There is nothing wrong with this. The key breakdown is when the onshore people haven't figured out how to say No!

In consulting, we are taught to never say no, but everything has limits. If I ask you to jump off a cliff, kick your dog, cheat on your wife and assassinate some Middle Eastern leader, the answer should be less collaborative and more direct.

Do you believe in your heart that clients will respect someone who never pushes back? The art of saying no requires discipline that is increasingly not found in the mouths, hearts and minds of those onshore. Consider for a moment, how easy it is for an onshore person to say yes to anything. After all, they aren't the ones who won't be seeing their spouses and kids.



Another consideration that I haven't found anyone discussing is the need for the onshore team to have extensive interactions with the client. Sure, a little sucking up goes a long way but generally speaking, does it make sense to anyone that the average onshore person spends at least eight hours with the client only to then when really tired spend another hour on a conference call at night collaborating with the offshore team?

Wouldn't it make more sense that the onshore team spend more time with the offshore team than the client and all the unproductive socialization that doesn't contribute one iota to producing quality deliverables? The current practice is upside down and backwards.


I can say first hand that I have met some truly talented developers from India, Sri Lanka and Brazil that I would hire in a heartbeat if I had my own company. Sadly, their self-worth is being manipulated and destroyed by the decision or should I say the indecisions of those who work for their firms onshore.

A lot of people onshore will disagree with me with passion, but I felt that it is important to keep the conversation honest and hopefully from incite comes insight and we can all find better ways to not only develop high quality working software but do so in a manner that provides us all with work/life balance.

Without some introspection, we all become a little less human. For me, I care about all the people on the planet and acknowledge that spending time with friends and family is so precious and work should not be an impediment to something that is a gift from our creator...