InfoQ

News

Leadership is not Obsolete for Self-Organizing Teams!

Posted by Deborah Hartmann on Nov 27, 2007 12:01 PM

Community
Agile
Topics
Teamwork ,
Leadership
Tags
Lean ,
Agile2007 ,
Toyota Production System ,
Value & Metrics ,
Kaizen ,
Management
In this popular talk from Agile2007, The Role of Leadership in Software Development, Lean software thought leader Mary Poppendieck reviewed the last century's managment theories, including Taylor, Toyota and Deming, and went on to talk about "the matrix problem", alignment, waste cutting, planning, standards and other topics including the role of measurement: "cash flow thinking" over "balance sheet thinking".

It is generally acknowledged that Japanese innovations in management raised the bar for manufacturing internationally in the 1980s:
“Only after American carmakers had exhausted every other explanation for Toyota’s success – an undervalued yen, a docile workforce, Japanese culture, superior automation – were they finally able to admit that Toyota’s real advantage was its ability to harness the intellect of ‘ordinary’ employees.”
-- Gary Hamel, “Management Innovation,” Harvard Business Review, February 2006
Poppendieck, formerly a process control engineer, participated in the change from statistical process control to Lean-style manufacturing processes at 3M. Her experiences there of excellent teamwork, improved productivity and continual improvement spurred her on to develop a similar approach for software development, resulting in her first book with husband Tom, called Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit.

Laughingly calling this her "controversial talk," Poppendieck skipped her usual intro-to-Agile slides and dove directly into her current research on leadership. Starting with Frederick Winslow Tayor's assumtions (circa 1900) that "workers will do as little as possible, and workers do not care about quality," she traced changes in management theory through Charles Allen's industrial on-the-job training in the '20's (exported to Japan after the second world war), the Toyota Production System (springboard for the ideas of Lean Manufacturing and Lean Product Managment today), and Charles Deming's formulation of Systems Thinking in the '80s.



Poppendieck summarized this history into three styles of leadership: 1) Old “Dictator” Style: “Do it my way…”; 2) 1980s “Empowerment” Style: “Do it your way... ”; 3) Lean Style: “Follow me…and let’s figure this out together.”

Within the Toyota Production System, the role of the leader is:
  1. to act as a teacher;
  2. to get each person to take the initiative to solve problems and improve his or her job; and
  3. to ensure that each person’s job is aligned to provide value for the customer and prosperity for the company
The section on standards was quite entertaining: the Lean idea of standards is subtly different from what many assume in North America. Rather than defining the performance threshhold (perform up to this standard, and you're OK), it is seen as the minimum threshhold: if you are still only meeting this standard in a month, then you've not improved, you are a "salary thief"! According to Taiichi Ohno, standards only serve as a baseline for improvement:
There is something called standard work, but standards should be changed constantly. Instead, if you think of the standard as the best you can do, it’s all over. The standard work is only a baseline for doing further kaizen. It is kai-aku [change for the worse] if things get worse than now, and it is kaizen [change for the better] if things get better than now. Standards are set arbitrarily by humans, so how can they not change?

When creating Standard Work, it will be difficult to establish a standard if you are trying to achieve ‘the best way.’ This is a big mistake. Document exactly what you are doing now. If you make it better than it is now, it is kaizen. If not, and you establish the best possible way, the motivation for kaizen will be gone.
The leader's job is to help people follow standards which they themselves made, and to guide them in continually improving their work, thereby evolving and updating their own standards.

View the InfoQ video of Mary Poppendieck's 90-minute talk from Agile2007: The Role of Leadership in Software Development.

Related Sponsor

VersionOne is recognized by Agile practitioners as the leader in Agile project management tools. Companies such as Adobe, BBC, CNN, Dow, HP, IBM, Sony and 3M have turned to VersionOne to help deliver greater value to their customers.

4 comments

Reply

It's would be nice to have it as mp3 file by Andrey Izmaylov Posted Nov 28, 2007 3:11 PM
Re: It's would be nice to have it as mp3 file by Floyd Marinescu Posted Nov 28, 2007 4:46 PM
Re: It's would be nice to have it as mp3 file by Niels Tindbæk Posted Dec 23, 2007 8:51 AM
Re: It's would be nice to have it as mp3 file by Floyd Marinescu Posted Jan 21, 2008 2:21 PM
  1. Back to top

    It's would be nice to have it as mp3 file

    Nov 28, 2007 3:11 PM by Andrey Izmaylov

    It's would be nice to have it as mp3 file

  2. Back to top

    Re: It's would be nice to have it as mp3 file

    Nov 28, 2007 4:46 PM by Floyd Marinescu

    Hi Andrey, we plan to do this soon, look out for it in January.

  3. Back to top

    Re: It's would be nice to have it as mp3 file

    Dec 23, 2007 8:51 AM by Niels Tindbæk

    That sounds great - i'm really looking forward to being able to download the content.

  4. Back to top

    Re: It's would be nice to have it as mp3 file

    Jan 21, 2008 2:21 PM by Floyd Marinescu

    Unfortunately this has been pushed back, instead we're gonna fix our videos in general by migrating to a new platform that will solve our runtime problems people have complained about.

Exclusive Content

Ruby.rewrite(Ruby)

In this RubyFringe talk, Reginald Braithwaite writes Ruby code to read, write, and rewrite Ruby. Demos include extending Ruby with conditional expressions, call-by-name and more.

Book Except and Interview : Aptana RadRails, An IDE for Rails Development

Aptana RadRails: An IDE for Rails Development by Javier Ramírez discusses the latest Aptana RadRails IDE, a development environment for creating Ruby on Rails applications.

Fast Bytecodes for Funny Languages

Cliff Click discusses how to optimize generated bytecode for running on the JVM. Click analyzes and reports on several JVM languages and shows several places where they could increase performance.

Scott Ambler On Agile’s Present and Future

Scott Ambler, Practice Lead for Agile Development at IBM, speaks on the current status of the Agile community and practices having a look at the perspective of the Agile’s future.

Manager's Introduction to Test-Driven Development

Dave Nicolette and Karl Scotland try to introduce non-technical managers to one of the most popular Agile development techniques: Test-Driven Development (TDD).

Structured Event Streaming with Smooks

Smooks is best known for its transformation capabilities, but in this article Tom Fennelly describes how you can also use it for structured event streaming.

How to Work With Business Leaders to Manage Architectural Change

Successful architectures evolve over time to meet changing business requirements. Luke Hohmann presents how to collaborate with key members of your business to manage architectural changes.

Colors and the UI

In this article, Dr. Tobias Komischke explains how colors used in a GUI can influence our interaction with a computer and offers advice on using the appropriate colors for the interface.