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#1. Lessons from an aircraft carrier.My brother-in-law is the CTO for a tech company in Boston and
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#1. Lessons from an aircraft carrier.My brother-in-law is the CTO for a tech company in Boston and we [View online]( [Coach Tony]( Coach Tony [@tonystubblebine]( #1. Lessons from an aircraft carrier.
My brother-in-law is the CTO for a tech company in Boston and we are visiting him and his family right now. He’s a passionate student of other people’s management lessons, often delving into the academic literature and best practices from other industries. Here’s [one that he sent me yesterday about aircraft carriers.](
Before you read it, consider first that these ships are staffed by kids right out of high school, failure is disastrous, and turnover is extremely high (because the Navy doesn’t like to keep people away from home for too long).Â
One organizational secret is the ubiquity of training, cross-training, and simultaneously being a student of one thing while teaching another.
“As a result, the ship appears to us as one gigantic school, not in the sense of rote learning, but in the positive sense of a genuine search for acquisitions and improvement of skills.”
But there’s another element which is the value of the built-in chaos. It is a good reminder that the well-meaning desire to build processes in your current company can lead to ossification and mistakes.
“One of the great enemies of high reliability is the usual combination of stability, routinization, and lack of challenge and variety that predispose an organization to relax vigilance and sink into a dangerous complacency that can lead to carelessness and error.”
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#2. Give yourself and everyone around you some slack time.
Another from my brother-in-law (Dan is his name), is a key point about queue theory. This is stuff like how you organize your task lists or project lists. There is again a well-meaning desire to optimize the slack time out of these types of queues.
Unfortunately, this always leads to blockages and breaks. I see this at work when a task is done incorrectly, but seemingly can’t be corrected because the organization is already on to the next task. So instead the broken task needs to be prioritized and re-added to the queue so that weeks later it can be fixed.
The secret is just to give yourself more leeway. When I say that this came from Dan, what I mean is that he was explaining this while recommending the mathematical proofs of this and other observations about queue theory in the book [Principles of Product Development Flow](. It’s a fun read if you like mathematical equations.
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#3. The mundanity of excellence.
One more Dan story, since I already referenced him twice. At the job before his current one, he was the head of supply chain engineering for a very large e-commerce site. Basically, he was in charge of the software that helped goods move into warehouses and then out to customers. Any efficiency saved massive amounts of money.
He had just been hired but hadn’t started when he and his family came down to Brooklyn to stay with us. Along with his family, he brought a stack of academic books on supply chain logistics. He had been hired for expertise in engineering, and nobody had asked him to be a supply chain expert. These books weren’t assigned to him.Â
Rather, he was just matter-of-fact curious about the subject he would be working on and was doing research in his free time of his own initiative. What struck me about it was that this is the type of work that a lot of successful people do that you don’t see. It’s what I mean when I say, “more work than you want, but less than you fear.”
It’s definitely extra credit type stuff, but it’s not overwhelming. We all have had many opportunities to do these types of extra credit projects.
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I feel obligated, having referenced my brother-in-law three times in a way that makes him seem exceedingly bookish, to mention that he’s also a very fun guy.Â
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