A company as spectacularly successful as Microsoft ought to be emulated by all businesses.
That's the premise behind David Thielen's new book, "The 12 Simple Secrets to Microsoft Management" (McGraw-Hill).
Thielen is a minister of business success preaching from the gospel according to St. Bill of Redmond. Everything successful in business can be traced to something large or small that Microsoft does. Even the most minor trait of the company is extrapolated by Thielen into a larger lesson for all.
It's a novel approach, but the basic tenets of Thielen's philosophy can be found in many books on the self-help and how-to-succeed shelves at your local library. Hire smart people; despite success, stay lean and mean; remain egalitarian; fight bureaucracy. If you've had your nose in a business book or been to business school, you've heard this gospel before.
The book is intended for executives and business managers of all stripes, and there are plenty of lessons for IT managers, particularly those in charge of software development. The starting point is hiring the best people. Thielen says Microsoft methodically and relentlessly does this, as any successful business must. It's not enough to hire mediocre people and train them, because at the end of the day, you've still got mediocre people.
Only with the best people on your side can you create competitive advantage over the companies that are stuck with the second- and third-best people. He uses this thesis to take aim at outsourcing, which he criticizes as cost-driven and counterproductive. Employees of outsourcers are not committed to your company's success and will almost always develop morale problems. "In another 10 to 20 years, outsourcing will probably rank right up there with New Coke as one of the biggest business mistakes of all time," Thielen says.
Screwing up is part of doing business
A lesson worth heeding is that of accepting failure. Employees who take risks and fail are much more valuable than those who take no risks. You'll only keep them, though, if you don't punish failure too severely. Accepting failure is a counterintuitive skill that is worth working at. Thielen says Microsoft is great at disregarding failures where a reasonable chance was taken.
He also says you should accept failure early in a project's life cycle. This is important, lest a loser project be kept alive even though it is doomed to fail. It often takes courage to speak out, though. Thielen's point is that it's always worth it, and management must encourage such judgments from employees.
Any critical reader or student of Microsoft will find Thielen's almost slavish admiration for Microsoft cloying. The book can be reduced to a worldview in which there is Microsoft and there are all other companies, which are like the one where Dilbert works. Instinctively we know that can't be true. And in the end, there are people for whom work at Microsoft, or a company like it, has no appeal. Clearly Thielen loved his years there, but not everyone is like him.
