I talked about the two most important cultures for a development organization, Goal Oriented and Innovation in my previous two posts. For a development organization to survive, it must satisfy the goals of the business it belongs to. It must align all its activities with the business goals and strive to achieve those goals. If the development organization would like to play a more important role in the business than just providing “commodity” technical services, it must continuously innovate in technologies and processes, in development process as well as the business processes.

But how can a development organization achieves its preset goals and how can it innovate? What’s the ultimate strength of a development organization? Not the thousands of computers it possessed and managed, not the technologies it embraced, not products or services it delivered, or the intellectual properties it possessed. I can be one hundred percent sure to say that the core competitive advantage a development organization has is its people. People are the most important resource that a development organization can draw upon to meet any ambitious goals it may have. Innovations are like springs, flowing freely to all directions. But, if we seek its origin, we will always find one or several highly educated, talented and engaged persons. Thus comes our third ideal culture:

Ideal Culture Number Three: Humanism

The meaning of “Humanism” from Webster is a doctrine, attitude, or way of life centered on human interests or values; especially : a philosophy that usually rejects supernaturalism and stresses an individual’s dignity and worth and capacity for self-realization through reason.

In wikipedia, “Humanism” is declared as a democratic and ethical life stance, which affirms that human beings have the right and responsibility to give meaning and shape to their own lives.

Putting in the context of the organizational culture of a development organization, Humanism has the following meanings:

• Realize People are the most important asset of the development organization
• Respect each individual as a human being with human dignity
• Respect and welcome the diversity among individuals in terms of capacities, interests, values and cultures.
• Strive to satisfy the increasing levels of human needs, from physiological to self-actualization.

One of the goals of a development organization is to replace manual, tedious and error-prone works with fast and cost-efficient automatic process carried out by machines like Computers. But we need to keep in mind that the ultimate goals and results are not replacing humans with machines. On the contrary, the goals are to free human from repetitive, tedious and labor intensive jobs and enable them to move on to more innovative and more rewarding jobs. Just like that, all the goals of development tasks are to make the life of other people, customers or colleagues, easier, happier and in general, better.

All the development tasks are done through a group of people. Although machines and tools are heavily used and important, it’s the people who drive the cold and thoughtless machines to achieve the meaningful goals. Sometimes, we are too focus on the tasks, the machines, the technologies and forget about the individual human beings behind the scenes. No computer can code its own program. No database can design its own architecture. No router can connect itself to the network. Behind all the tasks, there are humans making them happen.

Don’t be fooled by the titles, developers, testers, web designers, database administrators, system engineers…. They are not stereotypes. They are human beings just like you and me. They have families and personal life. After work, they are fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, brothers, cousins, etc. in their families. They have feelings. They want to be respected, appreciated, affirmed and recognized. They would like to have fun, be comfortable, relax and feel secure. They made human mistakes, like forgetting the passwords or mistype something. They have strength and weakness. They have talents and blind spots. To get the most out of them, treat them as human beings, not just “headcounts” or “hands”.

The more I studied the historical lectures of management, the more I realized unlocking the potential of people is the key to the success of an organization. This is especially true to development organization since it demands “intelligence-intensive” work instead of “labor-intensive” work. We are dealing with “knowledge workers“, as Peter Drucker pointed out 50 years ago, not manual workers any more. The more the organization attends to the human needs of the knowledge workers, the more it can expect to get out of them. In the other hand, as knowledge workers, we will gain our best achievements happily and cheerfully only when we work for an organization that cares us as human beings and satisfies our basic and advance desires.

In my first post, I mentioned that Cultures start with the Values and Goals and end up with Attitudes and Practices. The first three ideal cultures I talked, Goal Oriented, Innovation and Humanism, are the values and goals of a development organization. They are the underline principles. To achieve them, we need a set of practices, methods and policies to cultivate, realize and manifest those principles. I will continue to talk about those more practical ideal cultures in my future posts.

Do you agree or disagree my observation? I will love to see your comments!

In my previous post, I mentioned the reasons why I would like to write down the ideal culture in my opinion and explained the most important culture for a development organization, “Goal-Oriented”. It’s deeply embedded with the purpose of the existence of the development organizations.

If the purpose of a development organization is to help the business serve the customers, to grow the revenue and to improve the margin by cutting cost, how can it achieve that goal? The answer is sound and clear, through innovation. Thus the second ideal culture:

Ideal Culture Number Two: Innovation

A development organization should devote itself to innovation. That’s the nature of “development”. It provides “technology” solutions to the customers and to the business. It should actively participate in all the aspects of the business to make improvements through technologies. It should act as a “driver for innovations” in an organization instead of just providing passive supports.

Nicholas Carr asked a breath-taking question, “Does IT Matter?” It deserves some serious considerations from every one working in a development organization. If we are just providing “commodity” or “utility” services to our customers and to our business, WE DON’T MATTER ANYMORE! A foreseeable future for such a development organization is to be replaced by either outsourcing or offshore. The only way to survive is to act as the source of innovation for the business by constantly utilize the most relevant advanced technologies to provide the best products and services to the business.

Innovation is not only about keeping up with the latest technologies but also about continuously improving the business processes for ourselves and for the business. For example, we can innovate in the following areas:

• The software development process. This is about how we deliver the products. We can improve the quality and shorten the time to market by fine tune the delivery process.
• The operational model. When the product is deployed and serving the customers and the business, how can we make it run more smoothly? How can we fine tune it to satisfy business need and manage the capacities as the business grows? How can we prevent big outages which will cost us the trust from our customer?
• The interactions with our business partners. How can we better understand the needs of our business partners? How can we assess the satisfaction rate of our business partners?
• Grow the business. How can we help to grow the business by providing the best product and services in the market? How can we help the marketing people to better design the marketing strategy? How can we help the sales force to identify potential customers and finish the deal as soon as possible? How can we help the service division to give world class service to our customers?
• Cut the cost. Where can we replace the manual labor with more efficient and accurate automation? How to find the best supplier around the world?

Innovation in every aspects, everywhere, everyday! Only through Innovation, we can prove our values to the business. Only through Innovation, we can find the right position of the development organization in the big picture, the center for business improvement! Only through Innovation, we can claim we are the Profit center instead of the Cost center!

Being an engineer myself for almost 10 years, I can rightfully assume that all the engineers are very interested in innovation. We were trained in school to address real world problems with the technologies. For our career future, we need to constantly learn new technologies, new tools and new concepts. We like to fix things. We enjoy the challenges. However, since we are often disconnected with the business, it’s hard for us to fully utilize our skills and talents to drive business innovation. We don’t know the problems for us to attack and conquer.

To break that curse, we, the engineers, need to pay more attention to the businesses. There lie the best opportunities for us to innovate, to improve, to achieve something big. The management team should also work hard to better connect the talents of engineers to the needs of the business. And that also needs innovation.

Any thoughts, my dear reader? I love to see them in the comments. I will continue with other Ideal Cultures soon!

I thought a lot about the ideal culture for a research and development organization recently. Since I graduated from school, I have been in different development organizations. In each organization, there was something I like and others I dislike. Well, life is always like that. You almost have to swallow the sweetness along with the bitterness because they come together.

Although any organization has its pros and cons, there is nothing preventing me from imagining a perfect organization which has the ideal culture, with my own standards. It can serve two purposes for myself.

First of all, it can serve as a benchmark for me to evaluate any organization I am part of or will be part of. Since, in my opinion, the culture is the most important factor that affects one’s effectiveness in an organization, everyone should seriously consider the culture if he or she considers job satisfaction and career achievements important in his or her life.

And even better, I can carry the culture with me. No organization is perfect. But, at least I can change myself to follow the principles that I deeply believe. Mahatma Gandhi said, “Be the change you want to see in the World”. By practicing the culture I desire, I am able to create a environment/atmosphere around myself anywhere I go. After all, it should be we change the environment, not the environment changes us.

But, what does “culture” means here and why is it so important?

Generally speaking, culture “refers to patterns of human activity and the symbolic structures that give such activities significance and importance” (from wikipedia). Applying it to the corporate environment, it means “the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution or organization” (from webster)

The organizational culture starts with Values and Goals and ends at Attitude and Practices. It determines the “characters” of an organization. It must be shared by all the members of an organization.

Imagine if one doesn’t share the same values and goals with the organization he/she works. If one totally cannot stand the attitudes and practices of his/her co-workers, how can he/she be productive in such an organization?

That’s why most of the organization have the “new employee orientation” for the new hires. One major goal for that training is to imprint the corporate values and goals into the new employee’s mind and to justify his/her attitudes and behaviors to fit in the organization. Or even earlier, a wise organization should evaluate the employee not only by his education, techniques, or experiences, but also by his values, goals and attitudes. So, the new employee can naturally “fit in” after he/she comes on board.

To define the ideal culture, we can start from reviewing the goals of a development organization.

As Peter Drucker sharply pointed out, “There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer.” If there is no customer, the very reason for the organization’s own existence vanishes. We, who worked in development departments in a big organization, sometimes forgot that it’s the Customers who give us a job, not our boss, or even my boss’s boss. The reason we are here is to provide services to our customers.

An corporation needs a Information Technology department or a Research and Development department because it needs to provide better products or better services to the customers through the utilization of the most relevant technologies. The products or services may be directly used by the customers. Or they will be used other colleagues to serve the customer.

Ideal Culture Number One: Goal Oriented.

A development organization should have clear goals. Those goals should be tightly aligned with the business goals of the big organization we work for. They must be S. M. A. R. T. (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely), as suggested by many management best practices.

For a developer, actually, it’s kind of hard to link his or her own goals with the business goals. We are not customer-facing (that’s why we are not required to wear a tie every day at work). We are too deep down in the “hierarchy”. We only focus on the programs in our screen and the data our programs manipulate in the database. Who is our customer and what do they need? We don’t know and we don’t care.

That’s the exact reason why IT job sometimes can be boring. We hardly see the meaning of our work. Why do we have to work 14 hours a day just to meet that stupid deadline? By the way, where is that deadline coming from?

Only when we are able to link our jobs with the customer needs and the business goals, we can rediscover the reasons and meanings of our everyday work. We can regain the dignity and happiness we deserve in our jobs. We are not coming to the office to “do time”, like a prisoner does in a jail. We are making meaningful impacts to our customers! We are making their lives better through our hard work. That’s something worth proud of. And that’s the reason we get paid for. We deserve that pay check we receive every other week!

Another reason why every one should align their own goals with the business goals is more practical than restoring the meanings back to our job. If the business is not doing well and the business goals are missed, we will be punished one way or another. Reorganization can happen. Layoff may follow. Bad things will fall from the sky.

You may say why we should care. We can always move on to another job. Yes, but it won’t feel as good as the you get promotion and salary raise when business goes really well. Believe or not, our job is deeply connected with the business!

You may also feel that who we are to worry about the business. We are only a developer or a system engineer or a database administrator. We are just the IT guys who do all the back office work nobody cares. How can we impact the business? How can we drive up the stock price? The fact is our impact is much more significant than we realize. The application we designed and implemented may be the best seller in the market at attracts more customers and generate more revenue. One bug we put in the codes might cause many of our customers a half-hour frustration. Just recall how frustrated we were when we received a bill with wrong number in it and the time we spent in the conversation with the customer representative to correct it. Those angry customer will leave. Along with them, gone the revenue.

One of the key functions of the management team should be to identify the business goals, translate that into the goals of every one in the team, and to communicate the goals clearly to them. Every one should understand how his or her job is affecting the customer and the business. All the activities should be centered around those goals. Once the goal is achieved or exceeded, one deserves a pat on the shoulder, a kind of appreciation or a celebration party!

We, ourselves, should also constantly think in lines of the business goals. Think about what are important to our customers and our business. What can we do to improve the customer satisfaction, to grow the business and to save cost? Once we think like that, we will soon find out how important our work is to others, to the business. And we will soon find many opportunities open up for us to make meaningful impacts. The rewards will be both spiritual and material.

Aligning all the activities with the business goals are the most important culture for a development organization, in my opinion. What do you think? I will to see your opinions in the comments.

I will continue with other Ideal Cultures in my future posts. Stay tuned