The manager’s function is not to make people work, but to make it possible for people to work.

Anything you need to quantify can be measured in some way that is superior to not measuring it at all — Tom Gilb (Author of Software Metrics).

Gilb’s Law doesn’t promise you that measurement will be free or even cheap, and it may not be perfect—just better than nothing.

You simply can’t afford to remain ignorant of where you stand. Your competition may be ten times more effective than you are in doing the same work. If you don’t know it, you can’t begin to do something about it. Only the market will understand. It will take steps of its own to rectify the situation, steps that do not bode well for you.

In order to make the concept deliver on its potential, management has to be perceptive and secure enough to cut itself out of the loop. That means the data on individuals is not passed up to management, and everybody in the organization knows it. Data collected on the individual’s performance has to be used only to benefit that individual. The measurement scheme is an exercise in self-assessment, and only the sanitized averages are made available to the boss.

For anyone involved in engineering, design, development, writing, or like tasks, flow is a must.

Unfortunately, you can’t turn on flow like a switch. It takes a slow descent into the subject, requiring 15 minutes or more of concentration before the state is locked in. During this immersion period, you are particularly sensitive to noise and interruption. A disruptive environment can make it difficult or impossible to attain flow. Once locked in, the state can be broken by an interruption that is focused on you (your phone, for instance) or by insistent noise. Each time you’re interrupted, you require an additional immersion period to get back into flow. During this immersion, you’re not really doing work.

What matters is not the amount of time you’re present, but the amount of time that you’re working at full potential.

Your people bring their brains with them every morning. They could put them to work for you at no additional cost if only there were a small measure of peace and quiet in the workplace.

Appearance is stressed far too much in workplace design. What is more relevant is whether the workplace lets you work or inhibits you. Work-conducive office space is not a status symbol, it’s a necessity. Either you pay for it by shelling out what it costs, or you pay for it in lost productivity.

Management, at its best, should make sure there is enough space, enough quiet, and enough ways to ensure privacy so that people can create their own sensible work space. Uniformity has no place in this view. You have to grin and bear it when people put up odd pictures or clutter their desks or move the furniture around or merge their offices. When they’ve got it just the way they want it, they’ll be able to put it out of their minds entirely and get on with the work.

Managers are unlikely to change their people in any meaningful way. People usually don’t stay put long enough, and the manager just doesn’t have enough leverage to make a difference in their nature. So the people who work for you through whatever period will be more or less the same at the end as they were at the beginning. If they’re not right for the job from the start, they never will be.

Strong managers don’t care when team members cut their hair or whether they wear ties. Their pride is tied only to their staff’s accomplishments.

Entropy is levelness or sameness. The more it increases, the less potential there is to generate energy or do work. In the corporation or other organization, entropy can be thought of as uniformity of attitude, appearance, and thought process. Just as thermodynamic entropy is always increasing in the universe, so, too, corporate entropy is on the rise.

The most successful manager is the one who shakes up the local entropy to bring in the right people and let them be themselves, even though they may deviate from the corporate norm. Your organization may have rigor mortis, but your little piece of it can hop and skip.

Leadership as a service almost always operates without official permission.

Team jell takes time, and, during much of that time, the composition of the team can’t be changing. If you need to use a reactive strategy of contract labor, your team will probably never jell. In fact, the workforce you manage almost certainly won’t be a team at all.

The total cost of replacing each person is the equivalent of four-and-a-half to five months of employee cost or about 20 percent of the cost of keeping that employee for the full two years on the job.

Employee turnover costs about 20 percent of all manpower expense. But that’s only the visible cost of turnover. There is an ugly invisible cost that can be far worse. In companies with high turnover, people tend toward a destructively short-term viewpoint, because they know they just aren’t going to be there very long.

In an organization with high turnover, nobody is willing to take the long view.

If the organization is a development shop, it will optimize for the short term, exploit people, cheat on the workplace, and do nothing to conserve its very lifeblood, the peopleware that is its only real asset. If we ran our agricultural economy on the same basis, we’d eat our seed corn immediately and all starve next year.

The insidious effect here is that turnover engenders turnover. People leave quickly, so there’s no use spending money on training. Since the company has invested nothing in the individual, the individual thinks nothing of moving on. New people are not hired for their extraordinary qualities, since replacing extraordinary qualities is too difficult. The feeling that the company sees nothing extraordinary in the worker makes the worker feel unappreciated as an individual. Other people are leaving all the time, so there’s something wrong with you if you’re still here next year.

Companies that downsize are frankly admitting that their upper management has blown it.

Companies of knowledge workers have to realize that it is their investment in human capital that matters most. The good ones already do.

The jelled work group may be cocky and self-sufficient, irritating and exclusive, but it does more to serve the manager’s real goals than any assemblage of interchangeable parts could ever do.

Remove barriers that rob people in management and in engineering of their right to pride of workmanship. This means [among other things] abolishment of the annual or merit rating and of management by objectives. — W. E. Deming, Out of the Crisis (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Center for Advanced Engineering Study, 1982), p. 24.

Success breeds success, and productive harmony breeds more productive harmony. Your chances of jelling into a meaningful team are enhanced by your very first experience together.

Good managers provide frequent easy opportunities for the team to succeed together. The opportunities may be tiny pilot subprojects, or demonstrations, or simulations, anything that gets the team quickly into the habit of succeeding together. The best success is the one in which there is no evident management, in which the team works as a genial aggregation of peers. The best boss is the one who can manage this over and over again without the team members knowing they’ve been “managed.” These bosses are viewed by their peers as just lucky. Everything seems to break right for them. They get a fired-up team of people, the project comes together quickly, and everyone stays enthusiastic through the end. These managers never break into a sweat. It looks so easy that no one can believe they are managing at all.

If you’ve got decent people under you, there is probably nothing you can do to improve their chances of success more dramatically than to get yourself out of their hair occasionally. Any easily separable task is a perfect opportunity. There is no real management required for such work. Send them away. Find a remote office, hire a conference room, borrow somebody’s summer house, or put them up at a hotel. Take advantage of off-season rates at ski areas or at beaches. Have them go to a conference, and then stay over for a few days to work together in peace. (We’ve heard of at least one instance of each of these ploys.)

The Peopleware premise—our main problems are more likely to be sociological than technological in nature—applies nowhere more strongly than in the area of risk. The mechanics of risk management are widely understood; when it doesn’t get done, the reason is likely to be in the organization’s politics and culture.

People hate change. When we start out to change, it is never certain that we will succeed. And the uncertainty is more compelling than the potential for gain.

The fundamental response to change is not logic, but emotional.

It is frustrating and embarrassing to abandon approaches and methods you have long since mastered, only to become a novice again. Nobody enjoys that sense of floundering; you just know you would be better off with the old way. Unfortunately, this passage through Chaos is absolutely necessary, and it can’t be shortcut.

Chaos is an integral part of change.

Paradoxically, change only has a chance of succeeding if failure—at least a little bit of failure—is also okay.

High-tech organizations may accumulate experience at an astonishing rate, but there is no guarantee that their learning will keep track.

Learning is limited by an organization’s ability to keep its people.

When turnover is high, learning is unlikely to stick or can’t take place at all. In such an organization, attempts to change skills or to introduce redesigned procedures are an exercise in futility. They may even act perversely to accelerate the rate of employee turnover.

Successful learning organizations are always characterized by strong middle management.

In order for a vital learning center to form, middle managers must communicate with each other and learn to work together in effective harmony. This is an extremely rare phenomenon.

The science of making communities, making them healthy and satisfying for all, is called politics.