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Sep 22, 2021Liked by Steven Sinofsky

The Power Lab exercise made me think of a Systems retreat at the Nile Shrine Center in Mountlake Terrace where we all got Ballmer t-shirts at the start and Tyvec jackets as a parting gift. It was a day-long exercise in team building, nowhere nearly as intense as the experience you describe on Cape Cod. Rather than outright revolt, we mostly contented ourselves with snarky comments and subtle non-compliance. But the #1 thought in most people's minds was, "This is bullshit." I'm sure the trainers meant well, and I'm sure there were germs of useful information they were trying to convey, but one-size-fits-all exercises don't actually fit all. At that time, Microsoft was a bunch of outliers. It was the smartest group of people it has ever been my pleasure to be associated with, and the company was still that way in the late '90's. We knew we were smart, most of us had strong opinions about things, we didn't like to feel like we were being talked down to, and we lacked the maturity to put ourselves in the shoes of the instructors and show a little grace. We didn't feel like playing along, and we weren't willing to wait for the Big Reveal when all the B.S. would magically make sense. A crowd like that needs to be approached differently. I think it would have made more sense to give everyone the big picture up front: here are the essential points we will try to make, and this is why we think they matter. Some people do well with the approach that tries to first give a gut feeling for why certain principles are important, but I think most Microsoft crowds are too analytical for that. We want to be convinced, not indoctrinated.

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Sep 12, 2021Liked by Steven Sinofsky

An important part of what we senior leaders in DAD were learning at this point in time, was how to take the organization through regular cycles of renewal. There were a lot of important needs to be balanced in each cycle: Preserving the domain expertise critical to the success of Apps (a principle from the MikeMap era); Giving employees opportunities to seek new challenges; Consistent culture building through cross-pollination; and Aligning resources to strategy. (Steven might add more.)

We had some experience when OPU was created, where the “right” senior people were asked by senior leaders to move teams. This experience led us to do something radical when renewing for Office 2000: Once the group structure, staffing levels, and senior leaders were set, all engineering employees were encouraged to look to see what teams they might want to join. Senior management was involved in making the decisions on team structure and leadership and then later when specific leaders needed help to land or retain a specific person. This organization philosophy balanced the “change is scary” aspect of aligning resources to strategy with the “opportunity is exciting” dynamic of giving people choice. It definitely helped to build the sense of team across DAD and Office.

One of the difficulties of the Office engineering and organization process was the difficulty in looking very far forward in terms of emerging technologies and customer needs (See 12/24/48). In addition, members of the team often wanted time to look into new ideas and technology. While the senior managers were working on strategy, resources, structure, and leadership, we encouraged team members to explore new concepts individually and together as well as to steep themselves in the customer feedback and needs information that was part of product planning. By including an unstructured period for the exploration of uncertain ideas we did our best to address these needs. SharePoint and OneNote are notable examples that germinated this way, although the path from experiment to product required real product engineering cycle discipline as well as allowing for resources applied outside the engineering cycle model.

Speaking of the product engineering cycle, the renewal period was also one where we asked team members to contribute their ideas to improving how we all worked together from tools to processes. This was always part of the post-mortem run at the end of the previous cycle. Adding in an ability for people to try something new and unproven “off the clock” was an important improvement. An important part of the strategy, resources, structure, and leadership deliberations was how many resources were dedicated to bringing these ideas to life for the entire team.

Google popularized “20% time” for these kinds of activities. I never really calculated the percentage as I had moved to other teams by the time Google was popular, but I figure we had something like “12.5% time.” I liked this way of including unstructured time into the overall engineering process because it seemed to make it easier for more people to work together.

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Sep 12, 2021Liked by Steven Sinofsky

Power Lab remains on of the few truly awful experiences over my entire career at Microsoft.

A slight correction to the record, the “Tops” (very unfortunate terminology that I assume has been updated by Barry Oshry) arrived a day earlier and received indoctrination into the social system for running the simulation. I took a lot of things away from this whole exercise, but the number one thing was that Barry and team just lied to all the tops about what the exercise was. When reality was exposed, I felt wildly betrayed by the HR consultants and the Microsoft HR team. I still feel this viscerally when I think about it. Like Steven, the short course that was developed later, (I think we set the stage for it in the debrief both with Barry and team and Microsoft HR) proved to contain a lot of good organization concepts.

The good lessons? Number one: Trust no-one! That is the extreme way to say it (and really a lesson from the X-Files). What I mean by that is when anyone comes into a new situation, they need to thoroughly interrogate it to really know what is going on. One can’t assume anything. Number 2: All levels of an organization come to somewhat natural assumptions about events that are almost all delusional given the difficulty of clear and repetitive communication. A corollary to this is everyone in an organization sees events with their own ability to interpret them. It helps when people understand this and cut each other slack around misunderstandings, which goes both up and down the hierarchy. Clear and consistent communication both up and down and side to side in an organization is critical or one will get the delusions. This regular communication is essential to building teamwork and partnership.

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