Wow. I missed a HUGE HR townhall, er, employee meeting today (they announced new compensation and review changes). I just got the email from Lisa Brummel and, wow, wow, wow.
Is Lisa reading Mini? Damn straight she is.
This is the "Mini-smackdown" I wanted to see. Hopefully these changes will get us on a more customer-centric path.
One big thing that's gone? Stack ranking. No longer am I judged against Charles and Adam and Tina and Jeff. Now, either I'm doing a good job for Microsoft or I'm not and my review will now reflect that.
I LOVE these changes!
Also, I love the transparency that the Office team is experimenting with (you can see the Office team's ranking, and guess pretty closely what salary each employee there is making).
One thing I love about Microsoft is that we are willing to play with the business and make improvements. For a big business these kinds of changes aren't made easily, nor often, and I appreciate when they happen and the amount of work that goes into making them happen (I know someone in IT for HR, for instance, and he told me about all the work that's going on behind the scenes to change the review system).
Oh, and thanks Mini! These changes are due in no small part to you. Even if you don't get official props in the press releases.
Can one person change a huge company? Mini did. And we don't even know his name.
But, don't miss the work that Steve Ballmer, the leadership team, and Lisa Brummel did here either. Wonderful. Cheers. Now, let's get back to work figuring out how to make our customers lives better.
Lisa announced MyMicrosoft, a series of initiatives that'll make Microsoft a much better place to work.
There's a lot more to what she announced than I'm talking about here, but as I read over the list I'm just astounded.
These are not small little tweaks. They are wholesale changes to how Microsoft treats its employees.
Well, I'm off for a three hour drive from Livingston to Billings. I'll link to more on this topic later (I don't see anyone talking about this stuff externally yet).
By the way, my cell phone isn't working. So, stick with email until tomorrow.
Three hours from Livingston to Billings? You must drive slowly.
I didn’t know they took the towels away but now that they’re back that changes everything.
And LisaB is pure genius. To think she figured out it was all about the towels after only a *one year* “listening tour”. And I bet three months of that year was spent brainstorming the “My Microsoft” name. Give Lisa a 5.0, er… whatever it’s called now. Oh, I momentarily forgot the execs don’t have to go through that awful, nasty, icky review process anyway.
MSFT down $0.27 to $22.56. It just doesn’t get any better than this folks.
Three hours from Livingston to Billings? You must drive slowly.
I didn’t know they took the towels away but now that they’re back that changes everything.
And LisaB is pure genius. To think she figured out it was all about the towels after only a *one year* “listening tour”. And I bet three months of that year was spent brainstorming the “My Microsoft” name. Give Lisa a 5.0, er… whatever it’s called now. Oh, I momentarily forgot the execs don’t have to go through that awful, nasty, icky review process anyway.
MSFT down $0.27 to $22.56. It just doesn’t get any better than this folks.
@25. Still doesn’t address why he wasn’t able to effectuate change through the proper internal channels. I’d always been told Microsoft has an “open door policy”. So, the question remains… why did he have to rant externaly in order to supposedly be heard? Speaks volumes about MS management and the creedence they placed in the past in their employee polling. So maybe the former VP of HR couldnt’ keep it in his pants… doesn’t (the things you can find out about public officers) but does that mean the buck stopped there? If so, more reason to fire Ballmer.
@25. Still doesn’t address why he wasn’t able to effectuate change through the proper internal channels. I’d always been told Microsoft has an “open door policy”. So, the question remains… why did he have to rant externaly in order to supposedly be heard? Speaks volumes about MS management and the creedence they placed in the past in their employee polling. So maybe the former VP of HR couldnt’ keep it in his pants… doesn’t (the things you can find out about public officers) but does that mean the buck stopped there? If so, more reason to fire Ballmer.
Dave: it took two hours or so.
Christopher: Cingular told me it was their fault cause they don’t have any towers in Montana.
Dave: it took two hours or so.
Christopher: Cingular told me it was their fault cause they don’t have any towers in Montana.
dmad: one voice changing an organization of 60,000? Possible, but highly unlikely.
But add that voice to public pressure and add in other voices where everyone can watch? And change happens much quicker.
dmad: one voice changing an organization of 60,000? Possible, but highly unlikely.
But add that voice to public pressure and add in other voices where everyone can watch? And change happens much quicker.
Steve Ballmer at the Microsoft VC Summit 2006
One of the hilights of a Microsoft VC Summit is always Steve Ballmers intervention and the following QA. I have already referred to an interesting part of his talk regarding acquisitions, but most interestinglearning I got from the session is Ballmers …
If I may ask Robert, what exactly do you do at Microsoft. in HR, Tech, Sales, Marketing, Analyst?
http://www.irin.co.uk
If I may ask Robert, what exactly do you do at Microsoft. in HR, Tech, Sales, Marketing, Analyst?
http://www.irin.co.uk
@31. Actually, no it wasn’t one voice at MS if you believe the comments on mini’s blog were also fellow MS employees that felt the same way. I have to believe each one of those commenters from within MS also had managers that supposedly subscribed to this mythical “open door policy”. Are you telling me that MS has no method to capture internal feedback and take it up through the ranks. I know they do a yearly “survey”. Surely these opinions had to be coming through via this survey. Moreover, are you telling me that if MS management has an
“open door” policy that there wouldn’t be consistent feedback coming from various groups within MS that were hearing the same things? The only thing this suggests is that MS middle management is incapable of effecuating change, an open door policy does not exist and that MS acted out of fear rather than compassion. Again, to believe that mini was the impetus for this change shows MS has more management problems than anyone could imagine. And is more indication that Ballmer and his team is completely out of touch.
If all it takes blogging by disgruntled employees for companies to make changes, then those currently enrolled in any undergraduate or post-graduate organizational behavior major are wasting their money on anything they are being taught, and anyone that graduated in the field of organizational behavior should ask for their money back.
@31. Actually, no it wasn’t one voice at MS if you believe the comments on mini’s blog were also fellow MS employees that felt the same way. I have to believe each one of those commenters from within MS also had managers that supposedly subscribed to this mythical “open door policy”. Are you telling me that MS has no method to capture internal feedback and take it up through the ranks. I know they do a yearly “survey”. Surely these opinions had to be coming through via this survey. Moreover, are you telling me that if MS management has an
“open door” policy that there wouldn’t be consistent feedback coming from various groups within MS that were hearing the same things? The only thing this suggests is that MS middle management is incapable of effecuating change, an open door policy does not exist and that MS acted out of fear rather than compassion. Again, to believe that mini was the impetus for this change shows MS has more management problems than anyone could imagine. And is more indication that Ballmer and his team is completely out of touch.
If all it takes blogging by disgruntled employees for companies to make changes, then those currently enrolled in any undergraduate or post-graduate organizational behavior major are wasting their money on anything they are being taught, and anyone that graduated in the field of organizational behavior should ask for their money back.
“He wasn’t even influential enough when we wrote our book to get noticed.”
What arrogance and idiocy! Are you claiming that anyone not mentioned in your book isn’t influential? That if you aren’t aware of someone they aren’t influential?
“He wasn’t even influential enough when we wrote our book to get noticed.”
What arrogance and idiocy! Are you claiming that anyone not mentioned in your book isn’t influential? That if you aren’t aware of someone they aren’t influential?
“Now, let’s get back to work figuring out how to make our customers lives better.”
Could you start by having a word with the Anti-Piracy marketing team? Ask them to stop send customers rocks in the mail.
“Now, let’s get back to work figuring out how to make our customers lives better.”
Could you start by having a word with the Anti-Piracy marketing team? Ask them to stop send customers rocks in the mail.
Everybody at Microsoft (and Google) should listen to this interview.
Ballmer at the Churchill Club–the podcast
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/index.php?p=3031
Everybody at Microsoft (and Google) should listen to this interview.
Ballmer at the Churchill Club–the podcast
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/index.php?p=3031
Goebbels: a book has to pick and choose who to write about. It isn’t unlimited in its scope. We interviewed 188 businesses about how they were using blogging. Obviously there are more than 188 businesses blogging and there were about 30 million blogs at the time of writing the book.
Yes, we picked the most interesting and influential businesses we could when we wrote the book. Mini wasn’t a business blog, anyway, he just affected business, and he didn’t do so until the past six months. (Our book was, for the most part, finished nine months ago).
Goebbels: a book has to pick and choose who to write about. It isn’t unlimited in its scope. We interviewed 188 businesses about how they were using blogging. Obviously there are more than 188 businesses blogging and there were about 30 million blogs at the time of writing the book.
Yes, we picked the most interesting and influential businesses we could when we wrote the book. Mini wasn’t a business blog, anyway, he just affected business, and he didn’t do so until the past six months. (Our book was, for the most part, finished nine months ago).
Interesting post up there MiniMS has done a lot, even among MS employees and that’s no mean deal.
BTW, since you don’t really want people to email you, have you tried this tool called http://blogdesk.org for Blogging. It really pwns. My Review
Interesting post up there MiniMS has done a lot, even among MS employees and that’s no mean deal.
BTW, since you don’t really want people to email you, have you tried this tool called http://blogdesk.org for Blogging. It really pwns. My Review
[...] The Mis-appliance of science pt2 – working for Microsoft Microsoft is a better place to work than it was last week. I was out of the country on Friday. My phone downloaded the start of a long mail from Lisa Brummel – who I mentioned recently: A mail from a major name saying he was excited by Lisa’s mail, made it “Read NOW!” instead of “Read, eventually”. It takes something big for me to go “YES!” and throw my phone in the air when I’m in a customer’s building. That hoopy Lisa Brummel has only gone and got rid of the worst thing about working here: The Bell Curve Mini-Microsoft feels like “Drawing hearts around her name” and Robert Scoble loved the changes (when he could say more than “Wow”). To quote the Seattle Times The changes likely to have the biggest impact involve evaluation and compensation practices.The existing system doles out bonuses and promotions based largely on a controversial numerical rating scale. The number of employees who can receive a top score is fixed, sometimes forcing managers to give a lower score to a worker even though he or she might have performed at the same level as a peer. Until Thursday Microsoft insisted that staff performances fitted a normal distribution. Other companies believe this myth of mis-applied science – that everything fits a normal curve. It doesn’t – not if you recruit the best people (and Microsoft does – new starters are often overwhelmed with the calibre of people.). If you do get a Bell Curve you’re failing. Why ? Let me draw you a picture. The diagram on the left shows a Bell Curve for how the whole population would perform in a job: number of people is shown on the y axis, and performance on the x axis, 100% fall under the Green curve. If we recruit from top 10%, we’d get 100% under the red-curve – which is just part of the green one, stretched The actual performance people are supposed to deliver, is added in blue on the diagram on the right. The best possible performance is fixed, but the big spike in the “potential performance” (red) has been turned into lower performers (that’s the two shaded areas). There are 3 explanations for this We didn’t recruit the people we thought Our environment means about a quarter of people aren’t delivering their full potential. The basis of the grading system is wrong,. Previously, there was a distrusted and secret process where people were “stack ranked” (so helping others wasn’t in your best interests) . My previous manager sent his team a link to “Stack Ranking as a popularity contest”. Once ordered, grading forced the number of each grade in each group to match the Bell Curve – some people had to be doing well, the same number had to doing equally badly. Microsoft made $250,000 profit before tax per employee last year, how could 1/3 of our people be lousy ? THEY WEREN’T But the Bell Curve said they were. Common sense said some groups would have a greater proportion of “stars” the Bell Curve said they couldn’t As a friend who runs European IT for another large American company who use the Bell Curve put it: “If a third of my people are turning in poor performances, why have I kept them? It’s just as well that every manager has the same number, otherwise I’d deserve to be fired” The Bell Curve wasn’t enough to walk away from a job at Microsoft – though it would count against any company wanting to tempt me away. Even those who benefitted from it couldn’t make a case for it. How could we let it go on and still hold our values like taking on big challenges, openness, integrity, commitment to constructive criticism and self improvement ? A few railed against it, but most believed it couldn’t be changed, so said nothing, did nothing: proof that negative thinking is more potent than positive thinking, because it stops the possible from happening. I mentioned I did a spring clean of my documents. Among them I found “True communication is possible only between equals, because inferiors are more consistently rewarded for telling their superiors pleasant lies than for telling the truth.” There was a widespread assumption that no-one would tell Steve Ballmer that this needed to change. I also found some stuff entitled “Colin Powell on Leadership”, which contains some corkers such as “Never let your ego get so close to your position that when your position goes, your ego goes with it.” Some aasumed Steve had too much invested in the Bell Curve to accept change. I was introduced Thomas Kuhn’s “The structure of scientific revolutions”. last summer via William Leith’s book “The Hungry years” when it was book of the week on BBC Radio 4. It is about his experience of the Atkins diet; and he refers to Kuhn’s idea that revolutions in thinking come from outsiders – Atkins was a cardiologist, not a dietician: people inside a comminity cling on to old assumptions. Lisa’s Channel 9 video explains that her first job in HR was to be head of it at Microsoft, at Steve Ballmer’s instance…did he put an outsider in because he saw we needed a revolution ? On the flight home I made a list of 5 great things about this announcement – In descending order: Values. It proves they’re not just a puff piece, We do prefer the route which aids integrity. We do look for improvements. And we do take on big challenges.We shouldn’t assume that the person who prefers the hard truth to the easy lie can’t end up at the top of the company. Demonstrable Fairness. Some people stay out of management to avoid handing out unfair grades with “there weren’t enough arguments to stop others being pushed above you” .Now, if someone truly Underperformed they can be told what’s wrong (and what the possibilities are). And team members should see why one of them graded as “Exceeded”. Team working. It gets rewarded, rather than pushing others up the stack rank at your own expense. I think this means better products, and greater efficiency. We talk about “the people ready business” now we’re acting like one. Steve Ballmer’s ego isn’t an impediment to doing the right thing. A lack of cynicism. They could have announced this just before the annual MS Poll which measures organizational health. They waited till it had closed. This change makes Microsoft a better company for all it’s stakeholders. One other change caught the headlines; in a triumph of legumetrics over sense (or excessive attention to costs) in 2004 the company stopped providing towels in Redmond locker rooms. Adam Barr grasped that a towel has immense psychological value, and the change spawned public ill feeling. Lisa’s reversed that. I never thought I’d call our HR supremo “ a frood who really knows where the towels are” but as I said of her before it’s good to challenge those assumptions. Published Friday, May 19, 2006 10:54 PM by jamesone Filed Under: General musings [...]
“But, don’t miss the work that Steve Ballmer, the leadership team, and Lisa Brummel did here either.[...] Now, let’s get back to work figuring out how to make our customers lives better.”
Steve Ballmer did what? Precisely what?
Judging from various issues with Microsoft software I never knew existed until I had to look after a MS Windows 98 network, which later metamorphosed into a Windows XP network, “making our customers’ lives better” wasn’t high on the priority list.
And all this talk about “firing Ballmer” reminds me of a joke I once heard about some industrialists visiting a factory in an authoritarian nation. They asked the interpreter about productivity figures, employment issues, and soforth. One of them asked, “What happens if an employee is consistently late, works at a substandard level, and shows no interest in his work?” The interpreter said, “He would be shot.” The industrialists exchanged shocked glances, but the tour had to continue. Half an hour later, after they had finished and were heading for their taxis, the interpreter hurried up to them. “I just had a look at the bilingual dictionary, and the word I should have used is ‘fired’, in relation to unsatisfactory employees – not ‘shot’!”
As Terry Pratchett has said, “Give a man a match, and he’ll be warm for a moment; set him alight and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life!”
“But, don’t miss the work that Steve Ballmer, the leadership team, and Lisa Brummel did here either.[...] Now, let’s get back to work figuring out how to make our customers lives better.”
Steve Ballmer did what? Precisely what?
Judging from various issues with Microsoft software I never knew existed until I had to look after a MS Windows 98 network, which later metamorphosed into a Windows XP network, “making our customers’ lives better” wasn’t high on the priority list.
And all this talk about “firing Ballmer” reminds me of a joke I once heard about some industrialists visiting a factory in an authoritarian nation. They asked the interpreter about productivity figures, employment issues, and soforth. One of them asked, “What happens if an employee is consistently late, works at a substandard level, and shows no interest in his work?” The interpreter said, “He would be shot.” The industrialists exchanged shocked glances, but the tour had to continue. Half an hour later, after they had finished and were heading for their taxis, the interpreter hurried up to them. “I just had a look at the bilingual dictionary, and the word I should have used is ‘fired’, in relation to unsatisfactory employees – not ‘shot’!”
As Terry Pratchett has said, “Give a man a match, and he’ll be warm for a moment; set him alight and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life!”
[...] Scoble posts of some changes to performance reviews and compensation processes at Microsoft and he’s happy. Looks like they at Microsoft are moving away from forced ranking. At the end of the day, in my gut and in my heart, this is the way to do it. If you have good managers who know how to treat employees and you trust them to do it and do it well, they will do the right thing with the money. | Blog This | E-mail This | Print This | Permanent Link [...]
Microsoft ditches forced ranking
Regina points us to a post by Robert Scoble – Microsoft’s unofficial but omnipresent blogger – on MS’s ditching if it’s forced ranking process. “One big thing that’s gone? Stack ranking. No longer am I judged agains…
[...] Looking left and turning right: Microsoft management style Today, I was returning from my manager’s office to my own when I nearly collided with a manager in the hall. As I was approaching a hallway intersection, a manager emerged in a bit of a hurry looking to the left while she was turning to the right. She prolonged her view to the left for so long that her path was diverging directly into mine. In motorcycle safety course several years ago we were taught while taking a corner that we should look in the direction of the curve. Looking to the opposing direction could often cause us to veer off course toward the direction of our gaze. Referring back to my manager-turned-missile, of course, I scrambled to get out of her way before she hit me. This was rather awkward to do and by the time the manager looked back at me shuffling around, she look at me like I was the stupid one and didn’t as much as say “oops, sorry”.Nothing in this world enrages me more than managers with an inflated view of their own self-importance. But this is rather indicative of the problem I think we face in our company. We know where we want to go, and if we just focused on our own goals, we would get there in spectacular fashion. This isn’t the case, however. We fixate on what other companies are doing and what else we could be doing instead of directing our gaze at what we are working on until it is completed. Couple these misguiding glances with all of our team meetings, morale events, office sharing and quarterly group/org/company ra-ra meetings that do nothing more than tell us what we already know — or tell us more than we care to know — and it’s no wonder we cannot get anything done. I encourage Microsoft to start training our managers — and our non-management employees for that matter — to stay focused on the direction of our company. Stop worrying about what every other company out there is doing and start worrying about what we are NOT getting done on time. Our customers depend on us. You want to drive up customer satisfaction rates? How about delivering a product for them to be satisfied with! You want to drive up revenue? How about filling some warehouses with some freshly minted retail bits! Obsessing over our career options at myMicrosoft and worrying about work-life balance cannot continue to be our main focus. Putting our focus in that direction will only take us off course from our real goals. Trust me, when we deliver quality products to our customers on time and under budget, our career options will open up for themselves. And nothing makes work-life balance easier than getting performance bonuses that we can spend on our nights, weekends and vacations or put toward our children’s college education fund. Published Friday, July 07, 2006 4:43 PM by tobint Filed Under: Microsoft Culture [...]
[...] And you can read more comments at: MyMicrosoft Now Improved [...]