So, there appears to be a decent amount of grumbing going on regarding the delay of Vista and Office. My personal favorite quote is this, culled from Mini-Microsoft:
In my afternoon daydream, after Allchin’s email went out, I imagined all the L68+ partners from the Windows division gathered together and told, “You are our leadership. When we succeed, it is directly because of how you lead and manage your teams. When we fail, it is directly because of how you lead and manage your teams. We’ve had enough of failure and we’ve had enough of you. Drop off your badge on the way out. Your personal belongings will be dropped off at your house. Now get out of my sight.“
This is actually getting some mainstream press now. I’m often amazed at how powerful blogs have become… this certainly wouldn’t have been that big a story 10 years ago, or even 5 (I can only imagine at the gripes MS employees would have been saying about Windows ME… eek!). But never underestimate the power of some cranky people and a loud bullhorn. But that’s for another post.
Microsoft touts 6 main values:
- Integrity;
- Passion;
- Respectful;
- Willingness to take on big challenges;
- Self critical; and
- Accountability.
IMHO, the only one that really matters is #4 - Willingness to take on big challenges. The other 5 are not unique to Microsoft… in fact, they’re pretty much required at any successful company, regardless of size. But that’s a different post.
Taking on big challenges means taking on big risk. At Microsoft, you’re either willing to set some aggressive goals, or you’re not. And an aggressive goal means one that most people think is just unobtainable… and they’re usually right. As far as I can tell at Microsoft, most goals aren’t hit the first time around. But that’s OK. What’s important is pushing yourself as far and as hard as you can, and then push just a little more. This goes for pushing out huge, big projects (like Vista, which initially had tons of new features) all the way down to personal career growth (for example, me stretching and trying out the MS PM path). Sometimes you hit the goal, but often you don’t… which means you usually come close. And then you’ll reset, push through the goal, and set a new one even more insane than the last one.
It’s something I’ve learned since I’ve been here.
Now, back to L68+ (read: very senior people who get tons of cash and stock), especially in Vista / Office. Theirs is the glory upon success, and theirs is the shame upon failure. A lot of L67- (which means mostly L59 - L64) are put upon to work very hard to hit their deliverables, and often it’s a huge stretch that causes problems with work-life balance (meaning too much work), stress, and so forth. Often their deliverables can’t be met, and they’re then fretting about the old 3.0 - no raise - no bonus. Which essentially means a salary cut as cost of living gains 4% or so that year. So, when they’re staring down the barrell of a 3.0, you can imagine the frustration when people find out how much partners have received, even though the group hasn’t hit its goals.
One of the huge problems I see at Microsoft is that lower-level people are often at the mercy of other people and teams over which they have no control. This is hugely frustrating, as it means your destiny is in the hands of others, yet your performance is measured not on how the entire team or division performs, but your own individual performance. Now, the L68+ folks are the guys who are there to be good corporate citizens, and are supposed to be rewarded based on how the company does, not their individual group. So yeah, they want heads to roll… or at least have senior employees be held just as accountable for failure as junior-level employees are (and that’s value #6, for those paying attention).
Ultimately, holding leaders accountable for failure is the right thing to do. However, back to taking on big challenges… I think the entire incentive system we have is broken. It isn’t a zero-sum game of hitting a goal or not… 80% can in fact be good enough as far as the business is concerned. We want to incent and reward people for taking on big challenges, and give them appropriate rewards for how they do. Goals are just metrics used to measure success in very course, binary ways. When somebody tries something reasonable, we should incent that. When somebody does a good job at that, we should reward it. When somebody hits a goal everyone thought was impossible, we should praise that publicly.
So, here’s my closing thought for LisaB (and anyone else who is reading this at MS) — let’s change some culture. Let’s not focus on smacking people down for failure, be they low-level ICs or high level partners. Let’s focus on rewarding people who take risks. Risks involve failure, and that’s just part of life, but we should still reward those who push versus those who just take the safe and easy path, as when the pushers are successful, that’s when the glory will come.