Author Archives: Robin Wilson

About Robin Wilson

I spent 13 years at the UK's number one property website creating and managing multi-million pound digital products across the full lifecycle, from strategy, product design and development to implementation and operational management. I'm passionate about embedding great culture rooted in responsibility and systems thinking when building teams.

Freedom from Command and Control

There are several small forests worth of books on implementing Lean in a manufacturing context, but very few on implementing Lean in a service organisation. John Seddon’s Freedom from Command and Control: A Better Way to Make the Work Work is a stand out entry for me; part manifesto, part searing critique of traditional management techniques, it’s a brilliant approach to applying the underpinning philosophy of Lean to a service enterprise.

Seddon uses the term ‘Systems Thinking’ to capture the approach to developing highly functioning operations. As a vision for how to manage better it really gets to the heart of the idea that a manager’s primary role is to act on the system to make whatever work is required, work better. Your job is to make it easier for your people to deliver on their ambitions, to be able to exercise their heads to make their working lives easier and as a direct result – in fact almost as a side effect – create significantly more value for customers and massively reduced cost.

Paul Graham’s Rules for Love – Part 2

Paul Graham, serial entrepreneur and big cheese behind Y-Combinator (funded over 450 startups, including Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe, and Reddit) has a fantastic collection of essays containing all sorts of wisdom garnered over his years working.

Here’s some more highlights from a great one on “How to Do What You Love”

2. Always Produce.
a. Unproductive pleasures pall eventually. After a while you get tired of lying on the beach. If you want to stay happy, you have to do something.

Put any high performing, engaged team in a room and explore what motivates them and chances are you’ll get back a bunch of words like ‘achievement’, ‘competence’ and ‘contribution’. These values all have roots in the drive to build something, deliver a service, produce a feeling. What I really like about Paul’s ‘always produce’ rule is it’s ability to be both chicken and egg: you can bring up energy and engagement by just doing and you can also reinforce energy and engagement by seeing the results of the doing.

If you’re stuck in a rut, turning in circles, just start taking steps, make things different – produce!

The Machine that Changed the World

If you’re going to read only one book about the Toyota Production System, this classic has to be on the shortlist. The Machine that Changed the World is a deep, fascinating history and analysis of the impact of implementing Lean thinking on an enterprise, focused on the cultural manufacturing practices and philosophy embedded in Toyota. The contrasts against other car manufacturers are illuminating and occasionally brutal illustration of how not to operate.

Lean thinking is commonly associated with a focus on eliminating waste and building maximum efficienices into supply chains and production lines. The element not so commonly referred to (but just as vital and given equal prominence/priority by Toyota) is respect for people – the idea that your people are an enormous asset and should be given the space to use their brains and tools to act on the systems they work in to make things better.

Paul Graham’s Rules for Love – Part 1

Paul Graham, serial entrepreneur and big cheese behind Y-Combinator (funded over 450 startups, including Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe, and Reddit) has a fantastic collection of essays containing all sorts of wisdom garnered over his years working.

Here’s some highlights from a great one on “How to Do What You Love”

1. Do what you love.
a. But doesn’t mean do what you most love this second i.e. you have to work at it.

b. Whichever route you take, expect a struggle. Finding work you love is very difficult. Most people fail. Even if you succeed, it’s rare to be free to work on what you want till your thirties or forties. But if you have the destination in sight you’ll be more likely to arrive at it. If you know you can love work, you’re in the home stretch, and if you know what work you love, you’re practically there.

‘Love’ and ‘Passion’ are often thrown around when it comes to aspects of corporate culture necessary to produce engagement and shiny happy workers, but there’s a reason. Think of how much emotion is bound up in the nature of those words. Emotions are personal because they’re your feelings. If you want to get engagement with an enterprise, then people have to feel about it and that meands finding something they can match a passion for or develop love for.

As Paul says, most struggle but it’s a worthy struggle. Aim for love and even if you only hit ‘really like’, you’ll still be better off than the cubefarm.

Joy, Inc. – how Rich Sheridan created a great place to work

Just finished this. How We Built a Workplace People Love is a great inspiration and practical case study for all developers, digital product types and any fans of new fangled ways of working. There’s nothing too radical in here (agile, pair-programming, disciplined project planning, kanban, people as assets, humanity in the workplace – oh wait, that probably is radical in some cubefarms), but Rich Sheridan of Menlo Innovations sets out a great impassioned case for how they pulled off putting it all together.