Angelo Failla

“The rule is (as with children) that trust be given slightly in advance of demonstrated trustworthiness. But not too much in advance. You have to have an unerring sense of how much the person is ready for. Setting people up for failure doesn’t make them loyal to you; you have to set them up for success. Each time you give trust in advance of demonstrated performance, you flirt with danger. If you’re risk-averse, you won’t do it. And that’s a shame, because the most effective way to gain the trust and loyalty of those beneath you is to give the same in equal measure.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“Each time you add automation, you choose some particularly mechanical component of the work (that’s what makes it a good candidate for automation). When the new automation is in place, there is less total work to be done by the human worker, but what work is left is harder. That is the paradox of automation: It makes the work harder, not easier. After all, it was the easy stuff that got absorbed into the machine, so what’s left is, almost by definition, fuzzier, less mechanical, and more complex. Whatever standard is now introduced to govern the work will dictate (often in elaborate detail) how the few remaining mechanical aspects are to be performed.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“WE GREW UP in an age where stasis was a possibility and a desired state. Change was something you went through to reach a new and better stasis. We may have found such change temporarily unsettling or even unpleasant, but we knew that eventually it would be over and done with. We knew we could soon settle back to enjoy a longish period of reaping the benefits of the change. During that period, disruptive change would only be a memory. Well, those times are over. The difference between the early nineties and today is the difference between Lenin’s concept of revolution (destroy the old state and replace it with a new and better one) and Trotsky’s concept of continuing revolution (destroy the old state and also destroy each successive state that replaces it). In our new economy, stasis is nothing more than an object of nostalgia. We might look back at it fondly, as we look back at the pre-nuclear age, but we can never go there again. In times of stasis, risk is an unwelcome visitor. But today risk is a constant. Nobody is ever going to succeed again without constantly taking on risks. And yet, surprisingly, risk avoidance is everywhere.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“The more worried you are about failure, the heavier the armor you put on. But armor always has a side effect of reduced mobility. The overarmored organization has lost the ability to move and move quickly. When this happens, standard process is the cause of lost mobility. It is, however, not the root cause. The root cause is fear.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency