The no excuses culture

168 点作者 furkansahin大约 8 年前

34 条评论

Excuses happen because people don't want to be blamed. If your team had an excuses problem, it's a response to a blame problem: when a problem is identified, people aren't looking for solutions, they're looking for someone to blame.Saying "no excuses" and "we're holding people accountable" might fix the excuses problem, but it exacerbates the blame problem. "Holding people accountable" is just blaming people harder and hoping that will pressure then into perfection. It might work for a little while, but it's unsustainable. People will crack. This is especially bad in this story because it's literally coupled with a threat of termination.The real solution, I think, is to not play the blame game. Instead of "whose fault is this" you can just operate in facts: "what happened", "how can we fix it", "how can we avoid it in the future". Sometimes the facts reflect badly on someone ("he showed up high and made the wrong decision") but more often there's no blame needed to address the problem ("he made the wrong decision because nobody trained him"). Instead of creating a culture where people turn against each other to "hold each other accountable" for problems, you want to create a culture where people team up to solve problems.The story here is a success story, but I don't think it can be attributed to the "no excuses" rule--I've seen similar policies fail miserably. Instead, I'd attribute their success to their encouragement to identify problems early and ask for help. But that probably could have been done with less friction if they had addressed the blame problem.

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rdlecler1大约 8 年前

This is an example of a dangerous one-size-fits-all silver bullet philosophyFirst, this creates selection for a culture that punches below its weight. Never willing to stetch itself. Underperformers apply here.Second, this is fine when you don't have external dependencies who you can't simply fire. You may have to work at the speed of an organization that doesn't share these values and this becomes the rate limiting step to your growth.Third, if your company is a rocketship and you have a lot of leverage over your employees, you may be able to pull this, but in practice you're going to have to pick your battles. Failure to create a safe work environment can erode trust and make for a toxic and fearful workplace.

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munin大约 8 年前

Whatever kind of person Steve Blank is as a person is being discussed to death in the comments. I think that what this shows is that most people on HN have a lot of scar tissue from bad management. Bad management will say "tell me your problems before they become excuses" but then ignore you, then, berate you when the deadline comes due. "Why isn't the project done?" "Well like I told you last week..." "Don't give me excuses!" We've all been there.What Steve Blank writes here is the outer dialog and what seems to be missing is the inner dialog - listen to what your reports say! When an engineer says to you, at the end of the day, "this component just doesn't make any sense and I don't know what to do to make it work" don't just slap them on the back on the way out the door and say "I'm sure you'll figure it out, just try a little harder," maybe you as a manager should engage a little more then in the moment.

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analog31大约 8 年前

I've always been struck by an odd irony in academia: People tend to have left-wing political beliefs, but maintain an organizational culture that is decidedly authoritarian.Perhaps this is necessary: I can't think of how else to manage a classroom than to have hard deadlines for things like homework assignments. Even in college, by definition, the work is finished when the semester ends.I'm personally guilty of missing deadlines at work, and if I were permitted to be honest about it (or if it even mattered), my three excuses would be:1. Managing the complexity of my job is over my head, because there are too many internal dependencies.2. I'm going to miss this deadline because x[n] didn't happen, and I can't make those things happen.3. I was kind of hoping the task would vanish, as roughly 75% of urgent tasks seem to.

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kristianc大约 8 年前

This is a piece of positioning. It's not so much Blank giving any serious solution to the solution of 'no accountability' as him saying 'look at how tough and uncompromising I am.' He literally says he thinks 'creating a culture' is the same as 'I hung a sign on the door.'Well no. A lot of management thinking (5 Whys etc) has gone into breaking down problems into micro-blockers.If your graphic designer is constantly sick, then that is a problem, and it doesn't mean that your VP deserves to be fired for failing to open up Photoshop himself. It's not the VP's job to do as it as the VP is not a graphic designer. The VP isn't a hero for having a go- what the VP produces is likely to be shit.'No excuses' cultures tend to, far from raising accountability, attract the kind of mediocre performers who want to be told what to do, don't want to stretch themselves (as they're frightened of failure) and are looking for the next person to throw under the bus. No thanks.

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tzakrajs大约 8 年前

Sounds to me like the real problem is that Steve Blank does not have a system to get enough context from individual contributors to know that a project is slipping well before the deadline. This is a management problem being cast as a individual contributor problem (we need to fire those lazy, incompetent employees who don't ask for help when they should /s), what a bizarre inversion of reasoning.Edit: Management should be the ones held accountable for projects slipping their deadlines. The individual contributors don't just auto-assemble into on-time results.

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jacquesm大约 8 年前

The whole problem is 'hands off management'. Just get out of your jacket and work along periodically with the people that are below you in the org chart. That will create an atmosphere of being in it 'together' and it will work wonders for team spirit. It will also help to convey that you actually know your stuff (which will cut down on bullshit excuses like nothing else). Miraculously, even when you're in meeting with higher ups or other departments, the work will continue (who would have thought).Of course that would require management to be able to actually do something. The best managers I worked for did just that, and I copied their style as much as possible.Managers that isolate themselves from their department are the very worst kind. One guy I knew literally had a code-lock on his door to make sure he wasn't bothered when he was doing 'important' stuff (which was all the time, his door was always closed). Guess what happened to productivity in that particular company.

Karrot_Kream大约 8 年前

Having worked at a few places in my career now, I've found two dominant styles of management. Either you trust your team, listen to their "excuses", and try to help them unblock themselves (and come up with learnings to increase future velocity), or you _don't_ trust your team and constantly hold the stick above their heads. The former style lends itself to cautious team growth and views each employee as having a valuable skillset, emphasizing low churn. The latter seems to engender a hypergrowth strategy, where employees are seen as "resources" rather than important cornerstones of the company.Consider the following. Asking for help ends up blocking other employees _also_ laboring under their own deadlines, which incentivizes most employees to ignore requests for help.

chadaustin大约 8 年前

Funny, I was just thinking about this and Steve Blank.Early at IMVU we really struggled with our crash rate. It was a 3D desktop application for _mainstream computers_. This was back before Windows 7 and everyone had terrible onboard graphics chips with equivalently terrible drivers.During a board of advisors meeting, our CEO presented our crash metrics and justified it by saying "We might not be able to improve these metrics much - we're one of the only applications shipping 3D graphics on almost every computer."Steve Blank immediately ripped into him: "That's an engineer's justification! Figure it out!"I felt pretty guilty because I was the one who'd planted that idea in our CEO's head just days before.Of course there _were_ ways to improve application reliability in the presence of driver crashes. You just have to move the rendering code into another process like Chrome does, detect when it crashes, and restart. :)

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eric_b大约 8 年前

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that most people on HN don't like this attitude. I used to think this kind of thing was stupid too. "Oh, management by fiat, that will never work". I see comments here talking about management by fear, or, ironically, making excuses as to why this won't work most places.I've worked in numerous Fortune 500's, and without a doubt the biggest piece missing from the dysfunctional teams is always accountability. Or lack of responsibility and ownership (said another way). The high performing teams don't tolerate excuses or abdication of responsibility. They may not come right out and say it explicitly, but between the lines of success, that's what's going on. If you're on a team that sucks, it's probably because no one cares about doing a good job.There are many ways to increase accountability and responsibility, but sometimes people do need to lose their jobs. Trying hard is not sufficient when you're making six figures a year. Steve Jobs (I think) had the quote - "Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, excuses stop mattering". In my world, that's once you start making 100% more money than the median. I've never seen a big organization that couldn't lose 25% of its people and not miss a beat. In some cases 50%.Anyways, our culture has moved beyond responsibility and accountability. People joke about participation ribbons and "everyone gets a trophy" - but speaking generally, most of the younger employees I've encountered don't know what it takes to really succeed. They don't understand how hard you actually have to work to be better-than-competent at something. I know it sounds very "get off my lawn" - but the change (generalizing of course) is real enough.

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randomdrake大约 8 年前

This was a good post and an interesting idea with some nice conclusions.One of the commenters, however, nailed it and got to the heart of the difficulty: getting people to do what they say they will do. Period. Full stop.You can wrap excuses, or culture, or other corporate vocabulary around the matter, but it boils down to that fundamental thing of people doing what they are asked and delivering what they say they will.Managing people is difficult and if there's an organization who has had more experience organizing people to execute objectives than most anyone else, it's the military. They are damned good at it and there exists a lot of manuals and writings to this end.The commentor brought up an essay from 1899 that is still brought up in today's military training. It is clearer and more to the point of the fundamental need of people who can do what you ask and deliver what they say.It's only three pages and it's wonderful. A Message to Garcia by Elbert Hubbard:<a href="http://www.benning.army.mil/infantry/199th/ocs/content/pdf/message%20to%20garcia.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.benning.army.mil/infantry/199th/ocs/content/pdf/m...</a>There's an extraordinary amount of laziness and entitlement in today's businesses; technology is no exception. It is truly rarer and rarer to find someone who will simply: "carry a message to Garcia."

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nullspace大约 8 年前

I feel a little skeptical. One of the hardest and important parts of management is maintaining trust between you and your team. It's very easy to communicate something in a way that's misunderstood, and kills the morale. What then happens is that few people leave, and overall productivity of your organization plunges.Note that he spent about a third of the post explaining `I didn’t mean “deliver or else.”`. It's an indication that it's hard to pull off.I have no opinion on this this strategy as such (i.e. I think it sounds pretty good), but please don't try this in your org unless you are very experienced, and feel confident that you can communicate it well.

mate_soos大约 8 年前

If you to treat your employees as children, you will end up with a culture of excuses. If you give and take responsiblity for both your own work and the work of helping others do their work, you will realize that excuses won't be needed. People will inherently know they are either messing up or have messed up and will volountarily ask for help from others, who will help.Not trusting and respecting in your employees will corner them to behave like children and you will eternally (be unhappy to) be their parent. Treat people with trust and respect and expect the same. It will make for a much more happy and a much better performing team and ultimately, company.

Sorreah大约 8 年前

I don't like that article. I believe that it's entirely backwards actually.If you actually do everything right in your organisation, you'll end up with a "no empty excuses" culture anyway. If you try to enforce a "no excuses" culture without doing all the other things right, then your team is likely suffering and often won't get the chance to express themselves in actually pursuing what they think needs to be done instead. Sometimes, your team members have an equally good idea about where you should be focusing your efforts to get the most value out of them or avoid future pain points, despite what most management people think.So if you go about this wrong, you might lose that, but what's worse you might end up losing the wrong people. Sometimes things are out of your control. And even when you can get help, when everyone is focused on doing their best to avoid being fired, help from someone else is hard to get.So if you fix everything that would make following such a management strategy a huge disaster, you quite possibly end up not having to enforce such a strategy, because you got people willing to help each other and people who know what matters and what needs to be done.You end up with a "no excuses" team after you fix all these, but that's an emergent fact not the fact that got you all your success.

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Animats大约 8 年前

That's the Curtis LeMay approach to management.[1] He was famously into management by fear.We see this problem in software, especially in DevOps and "agile" shops, because the process is so forgiving of delay. In a manufacturing plant, no product comes out until all the component parts are ready. So there's a "no excuses" culture about running out of parts, or having an assembly line station down unexpectedly. Software rarely has that.Organizations with real "no excuses" cultures have spares and reserves. They have a backup plan if a key person is sick or unavailable, or something important doesn't show up. They have slogans like "two is one and one is none". This is seldom seen in software development.[1] <a href="http://www.au.af.mil/au/afri/aspj/digital/pdf/articles/2014-Mar-Apr/V-Meilinger.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.au.af.mil/au/afri/aspj/digital/pdf/articles/2014-...</a>

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vvanders大约 8 年前

Sounds very similar to one of my old bosses. He had one rule and one only: no surprises.Soon as anything is a potential issue raise it, find a mitigation and move on. Simple and works surprisingly well both on an individual basis and at scale.

WalterBright大约 8 年前

My father was a professor teaching business at a small college. On his first semester teaching, he assigned an essay due in a couple months. He said any papers turned in a day late got docked one grade, two days two grades, etc. He said no excuses would be accepted, because they had two months to do the work.The due date rolled around, and half the class turned in their papers late, and got docked grades accordingly.The next semester, there was only one paper late one day.

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williamdclt大约 8 年前

I'm surprised that nobody here realize that this marketing team has reinvented part of agile and lean managment? Making devs accountable but not holding responsible, group solving problems and Andon, prioritizing tasks, a bit about handling external dependencies, kind of sprints, visibility, staying on budget...They're obviously not following Scrum in Action at the letter, but I really saw a striking resemblance with the "agile & lean" company where I work

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seangrogg大约 8 年前

This sounds somewhat aligned with the culture that my manager has fostered where I'm working - just spun a different way:We come up with a target that we plan on achieving in 6 weeks and then we have said 6 weeks to execute on that plan. For example, if our goal is to add four features to a product we write it down and the intent is to deliver in six weeks.That being said, no excuses. When it comes time to deliver we should be able to deliver on anything that we committed to. BUT - and I think this is what Steve does a poor job of spinning - it's not that we have to have our original plan fully executed; rather, if we found a problem along the way it's expected that we raise the issue and course-correct. If one of those four features turns out to hit a snag we alert the PMs and generally just cut back our scope.The thing is that we are accountable for our work. Accountability does not mean that you'll necessarily accomplish everything on your plate - it just means that at the end of our timeline we don't throw up our arms and say that it didn't get done. We've been transparent with our stakeholders the entire way and so when something goes awry they knew about it well ahead of time and could do their own expectation management with whomever their stakeholders are - thus putting everyone in a much better position.While I would refrain from calling this a "no excuses" culture - which sounds really dickish and annoyingly managerial - I would say a culture of accountability is an extremely strong and empowering thing. It puts the onus on you to execute but enough latitude to express when execution is no longer feasible within the expected window.

BuuQu9hu大约 8 年前

"Excuses are the nails used to build the house of failure," or so the saying goes. A teacher used to repeat this phrase to any grade-school students who failed to turn in homework. He didn't care what the excuses were; no amount of excuse can undo the passage of time and the truancy of students.The bulk of the post is about compensating for the lack of excuses with compassion and teamwork, and avoiding creating a culture of blame. This is important. Excuses hide accountability, but blame makes communication impossible.

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xrd大约 8 年前

At first I was really resistant to reading this. "No excuses" sounds like something someone who has never been responsible for impossible engineering deadlines gets to say. But, I really like the way Blank defines it as "be in communication and ask for help so there are no surprises." That is great: I often find myself avoiding being in communication because I'm sure someone will offer uncomfortable solutions. But, those are the difference between a mediocre organization and a superb one.

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GuiA大约 8 年前

"[Steve] Jobs imagines his garbage regularly not being emptied in his office, and when he asks the janitor why, he gets an excuse: The locks have been changed, and the janitor doesn't have a key. This is an acceptable excuse coming from someone who empties trash bins for a living. The janitor gets to explain why something went wrong. Senior people do not. "When you're the janitor," Jobs has repeatedly told incoming VPs, "reasons matter." He continues: "Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering." That "Rubicon," he has said, "is crossed when you become a VP."<a href="https://www.macstories.net/news/inside-apple-reveals-steve-jobs-anecdotes-apples-little-known-facts/" rel="nofollow">https://www.macstories.net/news/inside-apple-reveals-steve-j...</a>

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tabeth大约 8 年前

As usual with business people, the author seems to believe their [simplified strategy] (no excuses) is what caused the outcome they describe. I think it's more likely from the article that the organization simply became more efficient as a result of said "no excuses culture", but it isn't actually the lack of excuses that did much. Why isn't it OK to just say "it's complicated; here's what we did" instead of trying to reduce it into some meaningless phrase.I think this pretty much says it:> By accountable I meant, “We agreed on a delivery date, and between now and the delivery date, it’s OK if you ask for help because you’re stuck, or something happened outside of your control. But do not walk into my office the day something is due and give me an excuse. It will cost you your job.” That kind of accountable.---What's an excuse? Most dictionaries define it as some variant of "justifying" an event. Some editorialize and use words such as: apologizing for, or making light of. Let's just take the essence, justification.Therefore, a "no excuses culture" is a culture in which there's no justification for events. Such a culture will likely fail in the long run as it fails to acknowledge the blind spot it's purposely ignoring. I doubt any business people would be proud of not knowing why they're missing targets...

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watwut大约 8 年前

It seems that original problem was that importance of deadlines was not communicated to the team. For example: "the January ad had to be moved into February because my graphic artist was sick, but I didn’t tell you because I assumed it was OK." does not sound like an excuse to me. It sounds like the person genuinely did not seen the event as important and may be surprised over this being big deal suddenly.It sounds to me that previous management did not valued deadlines and did not even made deadlines possible, so naturally employees did things previous management valued.

dccoolgai大约 8 年前

Some blue collar guys I used to work with had a saying: "Shit rolls downhill". Years later, I realized that had a lot to do with the way orgs with bad management deal with tech/dev: everyone likes to talk about accountability when it goes downhill to the devs, but no one wants to talk about accountability for having a clue about what they want. You could plug in space heaters in a circle in a conference room and it would have about the same effect.

lillesvin大约 8 年前

I've tried to stick to "no excuses" ever since I watched Rising Sun in the mid '90es. When Wesley Snipes' character is late he starts making excuses to Sean Connery's character who promptly tells him to stop making excuses and "don't be late". It's not a very prominent quote from the movie or anything, but for some reason it just resonated with me. Perhaps because I tended to make a lot of excuses.

smacktoward大约 8 年前

I'm of two minds on this.As many of the commenters on the original piece note, the idea of a "no excuses culture" will be familiar to anyone who's familiar with the culture of the (U.S., anyway) military, and generally speaking it works quite well there. It helps cut through B.S. and keep everyone focused on the idea that results are the thing that matter, which is important when results can literally mean the difference between life and death. And while it can sound to an outsider like a cruel standard, I personally found my exposure to it freeing -- it means not having to deal with the blame-seeking and post-hoc litigation of small mistakes that we all have to struggle with every day in other contexts. So in that respect, I'm all for it.The thing is, though, in the context of military culture "no excuses" isn't a stand-alone principle the way it's presented here. It's embedded with a bunch of other, complimentary principles that help sand off its roughest edges.An example would be the principle that responsibility flows uphill: leaders are responsible for failures of their units, even in cases where the failure is entirely due to mistakes by subordinates -- mistakes that they may not even have known were being made. (Because why didn't the leader know those mistakes were being made? It's their job to train their people to do the right things, and to make sure they're actually doing them.)This compliments the "no excuses" idea, because it limits its usefulness as a tool for powerful people to push ones farther down the food chain to do unethical things. You're responsible for the things your people do, so there's a strong incentive to make sure not just that they get results, but that they do so in ways that you would be comfortable being judged by.Without that, "no excuses" becomes a kind of blind eye standard -- "get results, I don't care how." Which can put immense pressure on the person on the receiving end of that directive to cut corners, fudge evidence and cross ethical lines if they have to in order to get those results. And if they do, the leader can then feign innocence: "I never told them to do those horrible things!" Well, yeah, but you put them in a position where the horrible things were they only things they could realistically do. You set them up to fail.So while I applaud the general idea, I worry that in the absence of complimentary values "from now on showing up with an excuse the day the project is due will cost them their job" becomes just one more way for bad managers to push blame that should rightly go to their own incompetence down down the org chart.

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coding123大约 8 年前

This story being about a marketing department might seem like it's not applicable to a software company, but when it comes down to it, we still break down our work into bite-sized stories that can/should be accomplished in a timeframe that's estimated ahead of time. Some shops have more nebulous tasks because they've never done something before, I get that. But for the build the thing we know how to stuff? We should be able to deliver consistently. It comes down to your ability to break down the work into small enough pieces such that you know how long it will take. If you don't know how long it will take, it's not broken down enough.Now to play devils advocate - I'm generally in favor of carrot not stick.

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Fraztastic大约 8 年前

Manager has piss poor communication then "solves" it by threatening to fire people. Genius.

tyingq大约 8 年前

He's in disagreement with himself.See point #3: <a href="https://steveblank.com/2012/05/14/9-deadliest-start-up-sins/" rel="nofollow">https://steveblank.com/2012/05/14/9-deadliest-start-up-sins/</a>

draw_down大约 8 年前

Sounds great, if the boss is not somehow magically delivered from being a responsible party, and as long as the boss's reasons for not meeting commitments are not considered somehow different and therefore "not excuses", i.e., acceptable.

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scandox大约 8 年前

No surprises. Agreed. Consequences. Agreed. Firing people. Bad idea. If the biggest lesson you teach people is the one they learn as they leave your organization, then I think you're wasting a good crisis.

always_somethng大约 8 年前

<pre><code> No excuses for failures given, just facts and requests for help No excuses for failures accepted, just facts, and offers to help Relentless execution Individual honesty and integrity </code></pre> Wow! I didn't know that the political aspects of small in-groups was so simple!We can just proclaim "PROBLEMS BE GONE!" and so it shall be! It's also so clear to me now!What a load of crap. I've been on at least six developer teams, and the one thing that's proven true every time is that third party externalities will always find a way to hobble progress, introduces stalls in productivity, and wear down morale.But there are deeper issues, particularly with software development, and undisprovable beliefs about which implementation of technology is THE ONE TRUE WAY.People will always use that as a wedge, to alleviate the amount of work on their plate, and declare efficiency as the driving principle. But then! Non-technical people, clueless as ever about the machines that govern their livelihood (as glorified CRM receptionists) fail to understand, the truth is that it's just technical people pushing work around, spreading it in different arrangements, according to their liking.<pre><code> Let's bind everything to UNIX users and LDAP permissions, that way the system administrators can control progress, and must be aware of all tangential events. Gee, I can't create a folder structure on this file system, because I have to wait for a sys admin to provide permissions just so I can create an index.html file at the location I need. How about we throw everything in a MySQL database, and persist our data over there? Awesome, but wow, our table schema is getting kind of huge. Managing it is a chore unto itself. Let the DBA team control every aspect of the RDBMS, so that every change to the database schema requires their involvement. This way, we'll always have to ask them for permission to introduce a new table or column. Okay, how about we just design our tables, to be gigantic structured text blobs, of unlimited size, so that we don't have to wait for a DBA to respond to our schema change requests? Sounds great! It's less work! NoSQL vs. SQL. Which is the one TRUE way? Man, this CGI programming is really hard, and our PERL codebase is tough to read. Let's try PHP since it's so much easier to code. Wow, our PHP code is so disorganized. We should organize it into classes. That didn't help. PHP permits too many ambiguities, and it's counter-productive. Javascript everywhere, at all times? Why not a full re-write of the entire system, because all we know how to use is one client-side technology? Object Oriented Programming or Functional Programming. Which is the one TRUE way? I'm having trouble sorting out which functions are in scope, because there are so many modules in this file tree, and I can't easily discern which file references which, and in which order. So many functions are similarly named, and many developers are simply overriding namespaces to control scope. We should restrict who can create new files in this tree, so the library stays sane. Let's bind everything to UNIX users and LDAP permissions, that way the system administrators can control progress, and must be aware of all tangential events. </code></pre> And so on...

BinaryWaves大约 8 年前

Yet another person blind to greed, so focused on money and profit they miss out on life