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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Ann Landers used to advise that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.

This week’s example is an IT organization extolled in a recent trade press article. Among its virtues, and those of its prominently featured CIO, are 70-hour work weeks, strong coffee, and amazing focus — its staff regularly deploys major applications in less than half the time estimated by professional services companies vying for its business. A Gartner analyst cited in the article credits it with highly mature processes which take incredible care of “internal customers.”

Through entirely accidental circumstances I fell into possession of a letter of apology its CIO sent to customers last week — real paying customers, not internal ones. Some snippets:

” … the vast majority of system problems we have are problems related to updates. These update problems have been manifesting themselves as inventory update failures, missing orders, missing images, incorrect status synchs, etc. At the end of the day, all of these problems boil down to [the company’s] failure (read, my failure) to architect a system that can handle real-time updates properly.”

This is simply irresistible, as Robert Palmer might have sang. Call me sarcastic, call me snide, call me an armchair quarterback — other than updates, what do transaction processing systems do? This sounds like ManagementSpeak for “problems with everything.”

“In the current system, inventory updates, orders, image data, status changes, etc., are all written to small files which are then sent back and forth between systems. The sending system writes and sends the file and automatically assumes that the receiving system processed the file. This “fire and forget” approach is killing us. In reality, a file might not send properly, become corrupted in transfer, or produce errors when the receiving system attempts to process it. In most cases, we don’t know when we have problems. The architecture is horribly architected.”

Well, yes, it is. One might think the CIO and his staff had never heard of transaction processing. It’s understandable. The technology has only been around for thirty years or so.

Oh — and repeat after me: Architect is a noun!

“In the new system, there are database tables between each system that we call “queue tables.” For example, when [the company’s] shopping database receives an order, that order is written to a queue table. Oracle picks up that order, and processes the order in the Oracle database. Once processed, the order is immediately written to another queue table.”

When one kludge doesn’t work, replace it with another. Memo to CIO: This is a solved problem. If the transaction processing built into Oracle isn’t to your liking, IBM, BEA, and quite a few other companies sell outstanding middleware that reliably posts transactions, on-line as they happen, to databases. That’s why it’s called On Line Transaction Processing (OLTP).

“We’ve added extra staff to watch the queue tables and handle any errors in communication.”

Good idea. Combine kludges with brute force. It sure beats using the automated alerts built into commercial transaction processing monitors.

“With that said, it’s critically important that I prepare you for the worst. When we began the Oracle implementation in February of this year, Oracle told us it would take 12-18 months. We cut the project scope down as much as we could for Phase I, forced our own developers to work incredible hours, and greatly increased the number of Oracle consultants on the project, all in an attempt to launch in early August.”

Hey, that’s the way to fix a problem with system quality — create a death march. Nice phrasing, by the way: “… forced our own developers to work incredible hours.” Alotta guys would have provided a financial incentive.

Okay, fair is fair. I’m unencumbered by facts, so my suspicion — that the high-visibility article in the trade press is part of a marketing campaign by the CIO to help him escape to a new job before the current one comes crashing down around his ears — is uninformed by first-hand knowledge of the situation.

Nor is my assessment of their future system architecture based on anything more than my own interpretation of the CIO’s apology letter. Maybe the plan really is Just Fine.

It doesn’t, however, take much inferring to figure that a CIO who focuses on pleasing internal customers, works 70-hour weeks, expects the same of everyone working for him, and takes pride on ultra-fast delivery is likely to take a few architectural shortcuts.

The problem is as it so often is: When you save on architecture in the present, you’re usually mortgaging your future.

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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

Ever wonder how they sleep at night?

Business executives sometimes have to let people go. Sometimes they have to lay off large numbers. There are occasions when companies have to push employees hard — to work long hours and extra days without any more pay.

It happens. The future being somewhat less predictable than the past, strategies don’t always turn out to be wise and tactics sometimes backfire. New leaders sometimes come in to find a predecessor has allowed a culture of mediocrity to develop, and with it the accumulation of too many employees, and too many of them with less-than-superb talent.

Business leaders sometimes do have to make hard choices. When the situations arise, the good ones do. That isn’t the question.

The question is whether they sleep well afterward; whether they accept large bonuses and option awards for doing so; whether they take joy in the exercise, as many employees suspect.

It turns out that many of them might.

KJR Club member Paul Novelli pointed me to an article by Alan Deutschman in the July 2005 issue of Fast Company recently, describing the research and conclusions of criminal psychologist Robert Hare.

Dr. Hare is widely known in his field for developing the “Psychopathy Checklist” — a twenty-item personality evaluation that’s the gold standard among law enforcement professionals for the diagnosis of criminal psychopaths. Dr. Hare has reached a disturbing conclusion: Many CEOs are borderline or more-than-borderline psychopaths. He suggests that boards of directors should screen CEO candidates for psychopathy — the absence of empathy, compassion, remorse and guilt.

I hope it never happens. In the modern world of business, if boards of directors were to apply the Psychopathy Checklist to CEO candidates, many would use it to identify those best suited for the job. They’d use it, that is, to systematically exclude candidates exhibiting capabilities for empathy, compassion, remorse and guilt. While conventionally regarded as useful personality traits, they can interfere with the successful operation of a modern publicly held business.

Enterprises compete globally. Among their competitors are companies whose strategies and tactics aren’t constrained by empathy, compassion, remorse and guilt, and which acknowledge responsibility only to shareholders — not to employees, customers, or the communities and nations within which they operate. Even their obligation to the law is limited to a comparison between the cost of compliance and the cost of the fines for noncompliance. (Don’t agree? Research Union Carbide’s track record in Bhopal.)

There have always been amoral corporations. What’s new is that behavior we’d consider psychopathic in a human being is business as usual in business. So when a company competes with psychopathic rivals and doesn’t adopt a similar stance it’s like trying to adhere to the Marquis of Queensbury rules in a knife fight.

Here’s a challenge for you, as chief information officer or as a manager who would like to become a chief information officer: According to Dr. Hare, chances are good that at some point in your career you’ll find yourself working for a borderline or more than borderline psychopath. Can you handle that kind of situation?

The easier (but still hard) version of the question is associated with those business leaders who harm shareholders — the Bernie Ebbers and Chainsaw Als of the executive suite. Harming shareholders is universally recognized to be Bad, so at least the situation is clear.

There are also many business leaders, at all levels, who exhibit more psychopathy than you might personally find comfortable but who don’t express it in ways that break laws or harm shareholders. If you report to them, you might find yourself dealing with abusive behavior, unreasonable demands on your staff, shoddy practices toward customers, assignments or explanations given to you that deliberately conflict with those given to other managers, or any of a number of other circumstances that break no laws.

The question used to be what you should do if you find yourself working for a bad boss. Dr. Hare has just raised the stakes, by letting us know some of these bad bosses are, clinically speaking, psychopaths. Bad boss or psychopathic boss, if you’re looking for the answer here, you won’t find it, because there is no “the answer” — leave, perhaps, assuming you have alternatives. In a large city you probably do. In a smaller community you might not. Not that leaving fixes anything beyond your personal circumstances. And where will you go, when managers are, in increasing proportions, required to behave psychopathically?

Businesses are, increasingly, psychopathic entities. According to Dr. Hare, many have psychopathic leaders.

One wonders which came first.

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