Death March

Bush is/was touted as the CEO president. I believe it.

Of course, my opinion of CEOs in general is not a very pleasant one.

Now, to be fair – I know some great CEOs/ex-CEOs – people who have a true genius for running companies. This is, in a nutshell what I think makes a good CEO:

1. They have a clear goal of where they want to get to, and clear reasons (based on research, facts and intuition) for why.

2. They hire solid people who really know their stuff, who are not blinded by marketing, ideology or personal biases.

3. They let those people do their jobs, and they believe them when they say why or why not something should be done.

The other 99.99% of CEOs/leaders don’t do these things. They are obsessed with their own belief in themselves. They are always right, and they eliminate those that disagree with them. They make ridiculous demands based on unsubstantiated and unclear goals, ignore or ride over objections, and blame those under them when those goals cannot be achieved.

Okay, so maybe I am a little bitter.

But the way in which the whole Iraq debacle has unfolded is so much like projects I’ve witnessed at places where I have worked that it is hard not to see the parallels.

Someone asked me the other day why so many soldiers in Iraq still seem so gung-ho and positive with all that is going on. I think that the parallel exist here to. I’ve seen developers (myself included) working ridiculous hours desperately trying to succeed against all odds, refusing to accept that the walls were falling down around them.

It is human nature to want to believe in what you are doing, and to believe that those above you know what they are doing, even if it doesn’t seem that way. There is a great book on development projects that are doomed, and yet still manage to get super-human efforts out of the team. It is called Death March.

Of course, the title is symbolic.

Right?

 

by Arlen