{"id":540,"date":"2006-08-08T00:09:01","date_gmt":"2006-08-08T00:09:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/?p=540"},"modified":"2006-08-08T00:09:01","modified_gmt":"2006-08-08T00:09:01","slug":"the-command-and-control-management-method","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/2006\/08\/08\/the-command-and-control-management-method\/","title":{"rendered":"The Command and Control Management Method"},"content":{"rendered":"

Frederick the Great [PDF]<\/a>:<\/b> \u201cSoldiers should fear their officers more than all the dangers to which they are exposed…. Good will can never induce the common soldier to stand up to such dangers; he will only do so through fear.\u201d <\/p>\n

The Command and Control form of management is based on military management. Primarily, the idea is that people do what you tell them to do, and if they don\u2019t, you yell at them until they do, and if they still don\u2019t, you throw them in the brig for a while, and if that doesn\u2019t teach them, you put them in charge of peeling onions on a submarine, sharing two cubit feet of personal space with a lad from a farm who really never quite learned about brushing his teeth.<\/p>\n

There are a million great techniques you can use. Rent the movies Biloxi Blues<\/a> and An Officer and a Gentleman<\/a> for some ideas.<\/p>\n

\"\"Some managers use this technique because they actually learned it in the military. Others grew up in authoritarian households or countries and think it\u2019s a natural way to gain compliance. Others just don\u2019t know any better. Hey, it works for the military, it should work for an internet startup!<\/p>\n

There are, it turns out, three drawbacks with this method in a high tech team.<\/p>\n

First of all, people don\u2019t really like it very much, least of all smarty-pants software developers, who are, actually, pretty smart and are used to thinking they know more than everyone else, for perfectly good reasons, because it happens to be true, and so it really, really bothers them when they\u2019re commanded to do something \u201cbecause.\u201d But that\u2019s not really a good enough reason to discard this method\u2026 we\u2019re trying to be rational here. High tech teams have many goals but making everyone happy is rarely goal number one.<\/p>\n

A more practical drawback with Command and Control is that management literally does not have enough time to micromanage at this level, because there simply aren\u2019t enough managers. In the military, it\u2019s possible to give an order simultaneously to a large team of people because it\u2019s common that everyone is doing the same thing. \u201cClean your guns!\u201d you can say, to a squad of 28, and then go take a brief nap and have a cool iced tea on the Officer\u2019s Club veranda. In software development teams everybody is working on something else, so attempts to micromanage turn into hit and run micromanagement<\/b>. That\u2019s where you micromanage one developer in a spurt of activity and then suddenly disappear from that developer\u2019s life for a couple of weeks while you run around micromanaging other developers. The problem with hit and run micromanagement is that you don\u2019t stick around long enough to see why your decisions are not working or to correct course. Effectively, all you accomplish is to knock your poor programmers off the train track every once in a while, so they spend the next week finding all their train cars and putting them back on the tracks and lining everything up again, a little bit battered from the experience.<\/p>\n

The third drawback is that in a high tech company the individual contributors always have more information than the \u201cleaders,\u201d so they are really in the best position to make decisions. When the boss wanders into an office where two developers have been arguing for two hours about the best way to compress an image, the person with the least<\/i> information is the boss, so that\u2019s the last person you\u2019d want making a technical<\/i> decision. I remember when Mike Maples was my great grand-boss, in charge of Microsoft Applications, he was adamant about refusing to take sides on technical issues. Eventually people learned that they shouldn\u2019t come to him to adjudicate. This forced people to debate the issue on the merits and issues were always resolved in favor of the person who was better at arguing, er, I mean, issues were always resolved in the best possible way.<\/p>\n

If Command and Control is such a bad way to run a team, why does the military use it?<\/p>\n

This was explained to me in NCO school. I was in the Israeli paratroopers in 1986. Probably the worst paratrooper they ever had, now that I think back.<\/p>\n

\"\"There are several standing orders for soldiers. Number one: if you are in a mine field, freeze<\/i>. Makes sense, right? It was drilled into you repeatedly during basic training. Every once in a while the instructor would shout out \u201cMine!\u201d and everybody had to freeze just so you would get in the habit.<\/p>\n

Standing order number two: when attacked, run towards your attackers while shooting.<\/i> The shooting makes them take cover so they can\u2019t fire at you. Running towards them causes you to get closer to them, which makes it easier to aim at them, which makes it easier to kill them. This standing order makes a lot of sense, too.<\/p>\n

OK, now for the Interview Question. What do you do if you\u2019re in a minefield, and people start shooting at you?<\/p>\n

This is not such a hypothetical situation; it\u2019s a really annoying way to get caught in an ambush.<\/p>\n

The correct answer, it turns out, is that you ignore the minefield, and run towards the attackers while shooting.<\/p>\n

The rationale behind this is that if you freeze, they\u2019ll pick you off one at a time until you\u2019re all dead, but if you charge, only some of you will die by running over mines, so for the greater good, that\u2019s what you have to do.<\/p>\n

The trouble is that no rational soldier would charge under such circumstances. Each individual soldier has an enormous incentive to cheat: freeze in place and let the other, more macho soldiers do the charging. It\u2019s sort of like a Prisoners\u2019 Dilemma.<\/p>\n

In life or death situations, the military needs to make sure that they can shout orders and soldiers will obey them even if the orders are suicidal. That means soldiers need to be programmed to be obedient in a way which is not really all that important for, say, a software company.<\/p>\n

In other words, the military uses Command and Control because it\u2019s the only way to get 18 year olds to charge through a minefield, not because they think it\u2019s the best management method for every situation.<\/p>\n

In particular, in software development teams where good developers can work anywhere they want, playing soldier is going to get pret<\/i>ty tedious and you\u2019re not really going to keep anyone on your team.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Frederick the Great [PDF]: \u201cSoldiers should fear their officers more than all the dangers to which they are exposed…. Good will can never induce the common soldier… Read more “The Command and Control Management Method”<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech-lead","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p83KNI-8I","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=540"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}