::.. Timing ..::

:: 2002/05/04 ::

Tom Demarco's Slack: The Only Carrot Left

At the recent Cutter Consortium Summit in Boston, I reencountered Tom Demarco for the first time in a few years. We had first met at a KM World conference in Camden Maine, where I was co-hosting with David Weinberger, and had a long rambling discussion about the theory of everything on the deck of a large sailboat in the harbor one evening. Demarco's influence in information technology has been really significant -- he is one of the founders of structured programming -- and perhaps I was unprepared for the breadth of his interests and acumen, presuming that he was yet another bit head caught up in the on-going inter-tribal battles that IT folks seem to have endlessly. He has certainly transcended those issues, and at our first meeting I was struck by the similarities between Tom and another luminary that I was lucky enough to rub shoulders with, Barry Boehm. Barry was chief scientist of TRW when I met him, and later on a prime mover at DARPA, but is probably best known for his work in software engineering economics. Tom, like Barry, has the effect of making everyone around him feel smarter, and more competent, simply as a result of the impact of his observations -- usually delivered, beguilingly, in the form of questions.

I have been unable to attend the past Summits, although in every one of the past four years I made arrangements to do so, and was forced by circumstances to cancel. As a member of the Consortium, I have always wanted to meet my fellow wizards, and spend three days noodling over the future of information technology.

This week I was (finally) able to attend, and Tom Demarco did it again. He gave a tour-de-force presentation, loosely following the themes outlines in his newest book, Slack. Afterward, I used my free book coupon -- all attendees receive one -- to cash in on a copy, which I have eagerly gobbled up in a few intense reads.

Tom's thesis is irresistable: much of managment doctrine, and specifically the parts that presume to understand time management, is hopelessly flawed, and as a result management is generally a failure. It fails to meet its expressed goals -- production or project schedules, quality products, and ultimately happy customers -- and just as fundamentally fails to meet the implicit social contract between company and worker, to create an environment of trust and shared striving toward mutual goals.

His examples, neatly explained and cleverly diagramed with an engineering bent, are a catalog of all the ills and evils that are committed or condoned in the name of corporate mismanagement. Having just been through a hellish spell as a marketing executive at a dotcom-ish software startup, reading the book seemed like a tortured fever dream, a house of mirrors in which my past year was reflected.

But in usual Demarco fashion, after finishing the book I felt somehow more prepared to make sense of the experiences I have just been through. Tom offered me concrete guidance, a lens through which to perceive management mania better. My experience is nothing less that Tom's core prescription: we need time away from work to make sense of what we are doing and how we do it. Plato wrote "The unexamined life is not worth living," which Tom proves to be a truism in the realm of work as well as philosophy.

Demarco suggests that good management -- especially of the growing population of knowledge workers -- will increasingly be oriented toward providing necessary resources, removing barriers, and standing out of the way: something like a well-engineered kindergarten. The industrial era mindset that is couched in medieval war metaphors and hierarchical claptrap is not only broken, but dangerous, tending to disenfranchise staff and management alike and also leading to loss of competitiveness and adaptability.

And the key element to this puzzle is time -- time to reflect, to dream, to collaborate. Demarco suggests the revolutionary, incites us to join the radicals who preach less pressure, slower pace, fewer demands, and more trust. And actually, Tom is making a call to faith -- not in the religious sense, per se -- but a call to management to believe that every one wants to do the best they can, to gain the regard of their colleagues and friends. Like the weak force in physics, this apparently weak incentive is at the heart of everything. After every other management inducement has been exposed as coercive, this is the only carrot left. Management must move forward, and work with this single premise, and everything else will follow.

order it now:: Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency


:: Stowe Boyd 5/4/2002 05:51:48 PM [link] ::
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