Start By Discarding the "Meh"
Mac or PC? Republican or Democrat? Vanilla or Chocolate?For many people, they have instant reactions to questions like these. I'm here to advocate getting off the fence and having an opinion, even at the risk of being wrong.
One of my personal heroes, Walt Disney, was asked how he kept persevering in the face of difficulty.
"We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we're curious... and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths."
And Walt Disney, like another of my personal heroes, Steve Jobs, was an opinionated guy. You don't build products and services that have the effect of a religious experience saying "Meh, I guess".
And some of you might be bristling at my characterizations above. "What about Linux?" "I don't care as long as its gelato." "Well my political leanings are better explained as a mix of Jeffersonian democracy and Rousseauian humanism". That's what I'm talking about. Enlightened opinions are entrenched, often not intractably, from a given perspective which leads to insights and observations that challenge the status quo.
And it is this challenge of the status quo where I believe the greatest insights (and not accidentally, the greatest value!) is often generated. Discard the illusion that "it doesn't matter". The only time it doesn't really matter is when you don't care. When you care, and when you can find and work with people who have an equal and honest intellectual honesty to what they care about, you can begin to have conversations and revelations about the topic of debate that are truly enlightening.
My Strongly Held Opinion: People First
One construct in technology management that I've been posed is the "Trilemma" or "Iron Triangle" of People/Process/Technology. It's a false dichotomy, since in reality, it's never quite this black-or-white, but the question is often asked like this: Your boss informs you that of the following three areas, you may keep 70% of one, 20% of another, and 10% of the remainder... how would you choose if you had to decide between People, Process, or Technology?For example, if you had your staff, Agile development/training resources, and some fancy technology (Ruby, Erlang, Haskell, Pascal, Fortran99, pick your favorite), how would you choose? If you pick Technology (70%) and Process (20%) your boss tells you that the team working with that technology and process is some outsourced dev team half way around the globe you didn't get to screen, interview, or hire.
For me, it helps to view this triangle as a pyramid, whose foundation is people. In a nutshell, the logic works like this: Technology is ever changing, and if there's a universal constant, it's that yesterday's technology sucks worse than today's. And in retrospect what you're working on right now, as cool as it may seem, is going to be obsolete, and need to be replaced, updated, refactored, redesigned, and rebuilt. Time and progress has a way of obsoleting the best laid plans, and as we all know fairly well, the best laid plans are often made with incomplete, inaccurate, or uncertain data.
Even if you consider yourself well-applied in your given areas of expertise, clearly you weren't always so. What has allowed you to distinguish yourself in your given areas of expertise is a desire to learn-- a desire to apply yourself. And aren't these more important aspects of what you have to offer than your current knowledge?
Your ability to integrate new learnings, new experiences and new techniques to the problem at hand is arguably more valuable than the sum total of all the book knowledge you currently possess.
And when you consider how much more productive your years of experience makes you today compared to where you were a decade or two ago, this gets compounded with time, while technologies fall by the wayside.
A similar argument can be made for the People vs. Process argument. Every process, every policy, every rule requires people to execute them. With "The Right Stuff" on your team, you could probably make a good pass at your software projects with Waterfall, RUP, Scrum, Kanban, or just plain "log it in Bugzilla/Redmine and we'll get to it when we get to it".
The Bottom Line
False dichotomies are a type of logical fallacy, and I'm not suggesting that any of the real choices you face will ever be as stark to have the iron triangle above shed critical light on them. But it does help to cement your worldview-- that if you had to allocate resources, strategies, and focusing on the things that matter the most, you're best off focusing first on your people for they are the foundation upon which everything else you build is built.And more directly, it's about the kind of people you want to hire. I helped write the "Careers" page for Salad Labs, the company I work for, and as we state,
"We fill jobs by looking for people who are the best equipped to solve certain types of problems over the course of months and years...
We believe that smart, motivated, creative people can learn just about anything, and quickly. When hiring, we try to err on the side of smart...
This is an entrepreneurial venture, and we look for people with an entrepreneurial spirit — people who are willing to be accountable, take the lead, take measured risks, and get things done. Note that, in this context, “entrepreneurial spirit” is not code for “does not play well with others.” We work as a team, and we hire nice people."
