Trust your gut.

I’ve interviewed literally hundreds of candidates over many years (possibly in the thousands territory now that I think about it) and one takeaway to share is that if you need to use an Excel spreadsheet to try computationally derive and convince yourself that someone is a right fit – that’s your automatic cue that it’s probably not. Especially when on the surface they’re technically hitting all the checkboxes, but your management spidey-sense is telling you something doesn’t fit, and analytically you try to prove it yourself that they are; that spidey-sense is coming from your intuition, which isn’t something you want to ignore.

And when you do find a candidate that’s the right fit, it’s clear as day. Or “right as rain,” as the Oracle from the Matrix would say. On a separate note however, sometimes you stumble across *amazingly* talented people, and although they may not be the right fit for the particular role you’re hiring for, in that situation you either modify the role or create a new one. Do everything in your power to find and attract talented people!

So check this out… Successful modern management is about moving away from command and control towards coaching, mentoring, supporting, and guiding. Your job as a manager is to empower, enable, and unlock people’s potential.

I recently read an interesting article on this topic in the Dec 2019 Harvard Business Review, which is about teaching managers to be less task masters and more masters of coaching.

The general premise is as an individual contributor you excelled in your area, you had all the answers, got promoted into management, and knowing what needed to be done, tasked others with how to do it. But in this era of rapid evolution, what worked in the past is highly unlikely to be a blueprint for success in the future.

The article describes four styles of coaching:

1. Directive: Telling people what to do. Requires high energy input, and you don’t get much in the way of energy output.
2. Laissez-faire: Let the team figure it out on their own (somewhat akin to Scrum based self-organizing teams). Low energy input, don’t get much energy output either.
3. Non-directive: Asking a lot of questions, and doing a lot of listening as well. Ultimately guiding individuals to solve problems on their own without you explicitly telling them the answer. Fairly low energy input, but you get high energy output as individuals feel a sense of autonomy and freedom to solve problems on their own.
4. Situation: The ideal dimension, walking the line between the directive and non-directive styles.

Coaching may not come naturally, especially to new managers, so the articles cite a few basic steps:

1. Assess the situation
2. Listen
3. Ask open-ended questions
4. Practice non-directive coaching

This is just to wet your appetite, the article is very in depth with a clear framework and guide with how to take your coaching to the next level. If you’re interested, you can pick up the Nov/Dec 2019 issue here:

https://store.hbr.org/product/harvard-business-review-november-december-2019/BR1906

Random product plug: Jabra Evolve 75

If you’re looking for a kick-butt headset for conference calls with all day long lasting wireless capabilities, you have to check out the Evolve 75. I got one as a present, and have been in love with it since, and few folks at work have gotten it as well and their clarity is so clear it’s like they’re in the room.

Hook it up!

https://www.jabra.com/business/office-headsets/jabra-evolve/jabra-evolve-75

Recently watched this excellent presentation by Rod Johnson on why you need a software delivery machine. With modern software structured around micro-services, self-contained-systems, etc… we need to rethink how to achieve scalable build and delivery pipelines that can scale to large volumes of repositories.

Just want to give a plug for one of my favorite podcasts: HBR’s After Hours. It’s with 3 really fun, engaging, and lighthearted Harvard professors, and they tackle various business/company topics and implications on society and culture. I guarantee if you listen to a single episode you’ll be hooked. Hook it up!

Wrapping up our annual 24 hour hackathon that we call Innovation Day. We had 8 teams competing across 4 countries on the categories of overall winner, biggest benefit to the customer, most innovative, and audience favorite. It blows me away every year what the teams are able to produce in such a short period of time – and then have the guts to do live demos to the entire company; really cool stuff from creative data visualization, to artificial intelligence, and business process automation. Incredible honor to be working with such talent!

Album: https://www.flickr.com/photos/teletracnavman/albums/72157711240997498 

We (the Pleasanton, CA based Teletrac Navman team) had an exciting day yesterday with two volunteering events at the Open Heart Kitchen.

First one was helping out at the Robert Livermore Community Center, serving lunch to the elderly. The second was packaging 2700+ brown bag lunches for kids. Was a lot of fun, and big thanks to our Pleasanton, CA based volunteering team!

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Question from one of our teams:

• Team plans for 50pts in the Sprint.
• A new priority comes to the team, team agrees to take it on, say it’s another 5 pts believing they can do that plus everything else that was planned.
• The team completes the original 50pts, plus the extra 5.
• At the end of the Sprint, what’s the % delivered? 55 Completed / 50 Planned = 110%?

Answer:

When the team is evaluating additional working flying into the team, it’s a collective decision to take it on, and because we want predictability and potentially shippable Sprints, we don’t want to take on more work if it’ll compromise not completing others.

Thus, if the team does decide to take on another 5 points, they’re increasing the commitment to 55 (in this case). Therefore at the end, if they complete all 55, their % delivered is 100%.

Spent the better of a week out at Atlanta, GA attending the FreightWaves Transparency 2019 conference. A conference about innovation, disruption, and digitization in the freight/transportation/trucking industry.

Some quick takeaways:

1. The industry has generally been slow to adopt technology, but in recent years there’s been a huge amount of technology adoption and investment.
2. It’s all about data. Suppliers, carriers, brokers, owner operators, etc… if you’re running your business using Excel spreadsheets, and interested in surviving, you better begin to shift gears and learn how to capitalize on technology. It’s all about freight visibility.
3. The ELD mandate was a major trigger point that forced everyone to use technology, if you weren’t already.
4. Capacity of trucks/drivers, and per mile transport rates, is traded like and is almost as volatile as the stock market.
5. Amazon coming into the shipping industry, effectively selling their excess capacity, poses a major disruption. Look for opportunities to capitalize on your strengths as things shake out.
6. Heavy use of machine learning / artificial intelligence in order to grapple the immense data being generated. Was interesting to see all the companies who have folks in dedicated data sciences roles.
7. Various startups looking to find a way to leverage blockchain technologies (https://dexfreight.io/ gave a cool demo) when it comes logistics and supply chain.
8. Autonomous Trucks – while everyone recognized the rapid progress and investment in the space, it was generally viewed as over-promised and that the reality is that level 5 AV is very far away (10+ yrs). However in 3-5 year term, helping drivers be safer was a key interest. Helps reduce insurance costs, retain drivers, and overall for an industry running on razor thin margins – losing a single truck to an accident is quite impactful.
   1. Anthony Levandowski was interviewed about his approach with his new start up, Pronto (https://pronto.ai/), a company taking an evolutionary approach to self-driving vehicles (start at level 2 at a practical price). He formerly was heading up UBER’s self driving initiative, and created Google’s foundation for AV.
9. Lots of rapid fire product demos!

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We’ve been progressing on our journey towards a higher degree of Agile, and the tool that we’ve been using historically is Microsoft TFS (currently upgraded to version 2017 Update 2). We have a multitude of teams that work on the same product, for the same release, but on different projects/features. Sometimes a team will be working on multiple releases (that are at different stages in their life cycle), or a project (if it’s big enough) may involve multiple (Scrum) teams.

TFS, from an Agile perspective, has been challenging to adapt. So with a very large initiative that we have under way, for a multi-team effort, the team took the approach of Area Path=\Project X, with Iteration Paths = \Project X\Sprint Y. Which led to some confusion in that it seems duplicative in that if you want to measure the project burn down, if all work items are under the Project X iteration path, why bother setting and querying off the Area Path as well.

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