Does a leader really succeed only if most of the followers are dumb?


My cab driver yesterday was of Bulgarian origin. We had quite an interesting chat driving from PHX airport to my home.  He was quite upset with the state of the union, and had a curious listener in me as his passenger, and we had a half hour to drive. His perspective somewhat amazed me – on two counts.

 

His first point was “The root cause of America’s problem is a lack of focus on education”. This in itself was not exactly new to me, as I have heard this from several people before. His next sentence was “And no government will do anything serious to solve this. Why? because it is easier to rule over people who are either uneducated, or who are not capable of thinking for themselves”. Apparently this guy got so worried about the system, that he sent his two kids back to Bulgaria to live there, primarily to “learn to think for themselves”. I could not help but ask him “So why are you living here then?”. He burst out laughing and said something like “because it is easier to survive here with just my average skills , unlike back home in Bulgaria”.

 

He also gave me his view on the state of his homeland. In his opinion, Bulgaria had been under Turkish rule for many centuries – and that any one who had been courageous to question the rulers have been systematically eliminated from the society over several generations. So, as a result – he thinks the remaining gene pool primarily is of people who could adapt, and get things done by going around rules, and cutting corners without getting caught.  He predicted without certainty that his country does not have a bright future.  I didn’t push him a second time on why he sent his kids there if that is the case. I am planning to do some reading on Bulgaria this weekend, and will reserve comments on this topic till then.

 

I have been thinking about this throughout yesterday evening and today “Does a leader really succeed only if  most of the followers are dumb?” .  My instinct is to say this is absurd , but the cabbie is probably not totally wrong either.

 

We don’t always question the information that we get, and as time progresses – I think, at least in general terms, we are mostly dealing with opinions and less on factual analysis.  In enterprise software space, where you would typically expect people that hang around to be not all that dumb  – often, you can see tweets and blogs along the lines of “I am right, you are sooooo wrong” about stuff that is yet to hit the market.  And if a big name fella says so – then it gets mindlessly repeated by his/her followers.   If you miss the sequence of events, it will become impossible to distinguish fact from opinion.

 

What is worse – the concept of self appointed leaders who scratch each other’s backs, and they hunt in packs. They remind me of an old story which goes like this.

 

There was this bully in a village market who used to go around asking “I am the strongest, is there any one here to challenge me?”. Well, it so happened that there was this other dude standing at a corner who had enough of this nonsense, and he stepped up to say “I challenge you!”. Next thing – the bully walks up to the challenger, throws his arms around the challenger’s shoulders and asks the gathering “Who is there to challenge us?”.

 

This behavior amongst people I follow online gets to my nerves very quickly these days, and I almost immediately remove them from the list I follow.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Is BI losing its clout to Cloud?


Ever since I came back to work after vacation, I have been getting this feeling that there is some decrease in appetite for BI amongst customers. It is not that BI is not in the picture – it very much is, but not at the very top of the list.  Instead, a lot more interest is now being shown on all things called “Cloud”.  Apparently, some analysts and analyst firms think so too.

On one hand, I am happy that cloud did not end up the way SOA did few years ago. It is actually funny – since in the overall scheme of things, SOA had a better definition than cloud. Even today, people are still trying hard to put good definitions on cloud computing. That is usually a sign that value realization is some time away. But apparently something has clicked, and it seems to  have picked the imagination of corporations. Hopefully vendors will capitalize on this, and we will see more tangible solutions happening.

But what happened to BI? Did a lot of people attain BI nirvana in 2010? Why did it fall from the top spot?

From past experience, I have always felt that BI is popular when economy is depressing, and the moment economy picks up – BI will stop being the big thing every one wants.  If that is the case – I am not complaining. It is high time this economy showed a decent upward trend. But somehow I cannot rationally accept this logic.  I guess I have to wait and see.

BI vendors are all gung ho about in-memory computing now.  I am wondering if in-memory solutions will need to be cloud based to get traction in the market today. There are known limitations, but if the smart engineers can overcome those – I think it will be a massive tide for BI if it uses in-memory in a cloud model.  How cool will it be to have SAP’s HANA on the cloud for example? Instead of hundreds of customers, thousands of customers can make use of it, and business processes will probably see big changes in a short time.

Now that is innovation – will we see it happen ?

How do you measure success and failure of projects?


There are quantitative and qualitative ways to describe the success or failure of a project.

In general, a project is considered succesful when it meets its objectives while staying within an agreed up on budget and time line. This sounds simple enough, except that it is not !

First, who decides if a project is succesful? And if a project passes a series of tests and goes live, is it considered succesful? The common model is to celebrate success at go-live. But going live is just the beginning of the journey. It takes a fair amount of time to judge if the business got sufficient value out the project. Also, at what cost? Did they have to hire more people to support the implementation? Can they make enhancements to the functionality as requirements change, without costing an arm and a leg? Do we attribute this to the original project?

Since I am more familiar with SAP projects than non-SAP projects, let me quote examples from SAP area. In the nineties, SAP was not as rich in functionality as it is today. Many implementations had dirty modifications to source code to make it work according to requirements. These were called succesful projects at the time. 15 years later, these same modifications have caused the customers a lot of trouble in upgrading their systems. So do we still call them succesful?

Second, all stakeholders have to agree to a set of objectives that a project has to meet. Sounds simple enough – but then, it is kind of hard to accomplish too. First, there is the legal issue – if you cannot express it in a language that lawyers agree to, the objective will not be present in the contract. And if it is not in the contract – it is hard to ensure it will be met. Then there is the question of the definition of who a stakeholder is. In large projects, there are many people who are affected, and it is impossible to get them all enlisted to create a list of objectives. So a subset of people is assigned as leads or representatives, and they may or may not know how the new project is going to affect the work of the whole population. 

In one of my first succesful SAP projects, I remember going to the office the day after go-live and finding a large number of trucks backed up from the loading bay all the way into the street. Guess what? no one remembered to capture the requirements of the picking department – so they tried to do it the old way, like they have done all their lives – and then could not update the system with the results. Thankfully, we could solve it with some quick work around – but the point is – you cannot figure out every one’s requirements all the time in big projects.  Voice of the majority does not mean something is right – there are plenty of exceptions in every business process, and they all should be handled.  Consultants swear by “Mutually Exclusive and Collectively Exhaustive” – just that as scope increases, the chance for hitting this paradigm decreases.

Third – how do you agree up on project time line and budget? It is by estimation, which is an inexact science by definition. Based on prior experience, some one thinks that a certain task will take a certain amount of time to finish.  Just as the stock market has taught us that past performance is not a good measure of future (for the short-term),  there is no guarantee that these estimates will hold true across the life of the project. Techniques like PERT make us eliminate bias by using formulae that goes from pessimistic to optimistic. But as all experienced project managers will attest – estimates are best guesses, irrespective of techniques. 

Now – this means estimates have to be revised as projects progress and we have more data. But the question remains – if I estimated $2M today, and then re-estimated after 3 months to find that it actually costs $3M – is the project already a failure? The world outside the project typically looks at projects with this perspective. Once an estimate is made for time and money, then the world expects it to be set in stone, come what may. There is no room for re-estimation.  So most projects get into this situation that they are set up to fail from the beginning.

Finally, no project has unlimited resources – so scope and timeline usually is subservient to available money. This means some one has to prioritize scope. And in this process, some requirements will need to be dropped. Despite the due diligence in this exercise – it is hard to avoid a decrease in value to some part of the customer organization. But when the project finishes and these gaps get exposed – usually it is put as a failure of the project.

Now, I am not the only one to have this knowledge – most customers, consultants and software vendors know this. But why would not this situation change? Just a rhetorical question of course 🙂