On the extremes of radical new management (part 2)

Over the last 20 years, I've seen a few management masterstrokes, particularly in senior management, and without being privy to the discussions that led to them, I have on occasion tried to rationalise the oddity with possible explanations - here are some of my thoughts.

Being Radical
Often, when a new person is brought into a senior managerial role, the company is looking for change - typically a big change - because they believe that something is fundamentally wrong.  Companies get stuck in a rut when the culture stagnates around existing or historical dogma.  They think they need a big culture shock / kick up the backside to get things back on track, and who better to give this high risk strategy to than....

On the extremes of radical new management (part 1)

The early days of my career were spent with a small struggling software company competing in a challenging market mostly dominated by much larger players.  Our company had a different vision, some very talented people and culture of taking raw talent and honing it through collaboration and mentoring.

We had a development lead - let's call him Dave to protect his true identity as everyone knows 3 or 4 Daves.  Dave was an unassuming genius who loved what he did and always had time for others. Within a couple of years of professional development, I had seen Dave perform some extraordinary feats of technical mastery and I aspired to be just like him.  I thought I was getting pretty good at what I did, but Dave was the guy that all the devs looked up to and relied on when things broke in ways that no one else could fix.

Then a strange thing happened...

...and just enough refactoring to not screw it all up

From my previous post, you might have learned that I'm working with a small company that have yet to reach the level of maturity where a more rigorous development process would not be viewed as over-egging. Disturbingly, we already have a legacy codebase since the original concepts had been kicked around for a while in prototype form before morphing into the real application. Regardless of my personal opinions, anytime I want to embark on a radical phase of improvement, I find it useful to ask myself whether I would want that right now if I was paying the bill, or whether there are still bigger fish to fry.