My company is getting a new CEO. The old CEO does not have any vision, so we actually have some hope that the new CEO will turn the company around. However today I heard some news that make me totally lost my confidence in our new CEO. My source comes from the IT department, they got an direct order from the CEO to upgrade the computers in our company to Vista. The CEO seems to believe using Vista will increase our productivity. I smell there is a sign of trouble in the company. Remember, you heard this from me first.

Never mind the whole XP vs Vista debate about which is a better OS. (The answer is quite evidently obvious.) Why would the CEO care what OS the employees use at all? He should care about our business strategy, concert about our product road map, the morale of the employees, the operating cost etc. What OS to use is the last thing he should worry about. That’s the job of our IT department. Oh well! I guess he probably not aware of most engineers in the company use Windows only to write document, check emails and surf the web. We do our engineering work in Linux! If a CEO lost focus and spent time worrying which OS to use, I don’t think the company will be in a very good shape. Maybe it’s time to sell our stocks.

There is someone act like a leech at work. Like a real leech, he sucks on other people’s blood to survive. In fact, he is worst than a lazy bone with zero productivity. He has negative productivity because others have to spent time to deal with him. Unfortunately, I have to deal with a leech in my current project. He does not belongs to our department, we do even work under the same boss. My project is one of my high profile project this year, so our jobs is quite security for the time being. The leech needs to justify his his value of existence in the company, so he approaches our project and offer some help, so that he can bill his salary using our time code. We are under staff, so we have no reason not taking his help. This is where my headache begins.
In the initial agreement, he will delivery some reusable code for our testbench. The first week seems pretty good, he came up with nice presentation slides and a 30 pages document. Actually what he had planned well fit into our verification strategy. Then the next deliverable from he is to implement the design and gave us some code. His code is delayed, which is kinda expected like every other work in my company. The code is not compatible with our code, so it is completely useless. There are many lines of code, so at least he has done some hard work.

I gave him the benefit of double on miscommunication of our requirements and ask him to fix the code. Then I smell something funny, he keep pushing back to make any changes to his code. He keeps saying his code would work with our testbench if we change our design to fit his code. This raise my suspicious, I dive in and take a closer look. It turn out those are not his code after all. He simply copy some old code from someone who had left the company, renaming the the old project name to the new project name in code.  If copying someone’s homework in school is plagiarism, what do we call copying someone’s code at work?

I flag his plagiarism to my boss and my boss flag it to the leech’s boss. However, this leech is quite senior, even more senior than my boss, so we can’t get rid of him without good reason. He is still with our project and our problem is finding some work for him to do. We can’t give him mission critical task since he may fail to delivery and jeopardize the project. We can’t let him sitting idle, since he is accountable for the project cost. At the end, we decide to use him like the Indian contractors. We will give him specific requirement and ask him to implement the code. At the same time, we have a contingency plan. If he fail to deliver, we will distribute the work among other team members and take the hit to our schedule. If he fails again, then we have enough evidence to black list him and kick him off from our project.

I just come across a very interesting article, Selling Innovation by Blast Radius.  I would like to share its insights with my fellow readers.  In business world, every one knows the importance of innovation.  Be innovate or get leave behind.  If you are working in the startup, it is easy to try something new.  It is what a start up is for after all.  But if you are working in a big company, the corporate culture, tradition are usually on the way of innovation.  The key to run an innovation project in a mature company is get the blessing of the CxO.  This article gives 8 useful tips how to get CxO on your side.

There are two types of innovations, incremental and disruptive.  Incremental innovation is merely product improvement, even big company that on regular basis, so it is already part of the system.  Disruptive innovation is a high risk, high reward venture.  The key to run a successful disruptive innovation project to have the buy-in of the CxO and keep him interest through out the project.  The key is to think like the CxO, address their concerns so that you can gain their trust and build up your credibility.   Here are the 8 tips:

1. Be passionate but balance.  Don’t down play the risk factor.  If you don’t disclose enough risk to satisfy the CxO, he will invent some for you.
2. Measure creativity.  Number is your best friend, it shows your achievement.  If you don’t have a number ready in hand, don’t be afraid to invent some useful indicators.
3. Change course willing.  If something is not going well, you better have a fix before others tell you how to fix the problem.
4. Giver direct answers, even when the answer is “I don’t know”.  People smells dodge answers, it hurts your credibility more than a plain “I don’t know.”
5. Ask for regular review.  CxO hates surprises.  They will kill your project if they don’t know what you are actually doing.
6. Don’t take all the credit.  It is NOT your project.
7. Defend without being defensive.  CxO is not cheerleader.   It is his job to challenge you, don’t take it personal.
8. Did I say be passionate but balance?

This article is quite enlightening, highly recommanded.