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Engineering MBA: Be The Boss of Your Own Work
Kevin Murphy
@kevin-j-m
#leadership
#business-strategy
#career-development
#software-development
#team-dynamics
Summarized using AI

Engineering MBA: Be The Boss of Your Own Work

by Kevin Murphy

In the video titled "Engineering MBA: Be The Boss of Your Own Work," presented by Kevin Murphy at RailsConf 2021, developers are introduced to essential MBA skills tailored specifically for their daily work without the need for traditional business school expenses or commitments. The session covers three main courses aimed at enhancing developers' roles through better strategic planning, leadership, and process management.

Key points discussed include:
- Situational Leadership: Murphy explains the four styles of leadership— directing, coaching, supporting, and delegating. He emphasizes the importance of understanding which style to employ based on the team's current needs during processes such as sprint planning.
- Directing: Involves close supervision and clear instructions.
- Coaching: Provides context and invites team input.
- Supporting: Empowers the team to make decisions while facilitators mainly encourage and assist with relationships.
- Delegating: Grants full autonomy to the team members, allowing leaders to focus on broader objectives.

  • Competitive Advantage: Murphy discusses three strategies that organizations can utilize to succeed in the market:

    • Cost Strategy: Offering services at a lower price by enhancing efficiencies or leveraging unique resources.
    • Differentiation Strategy: Delivering unique or superior offerings that appeal to customers, possibly through exceptional customer service.
    • Focus Strategy: Targeting a specific niche market and tailoring products to meet those specialized needs.

  • Process Management: Murphy presents a step-by-step method for managing business processes, emphasizing continuous improvement and optimization. The five steps include:

    • Design: Documenting current processes.
    • Modeling: Analyzing potential changes.
    • Execution: Rolling out changes in a controlled manner.
    • Monitoring: Using KPIs to assess process effectiveness.
    • Optimization: Continuously refining processes for better performance.

The overarching conclusion highlights that effective leadership and strategic decision-making play crucial roles in enhancing everyday processes. Furthermore, the importance of considering the broader impacts of technological decisions on all stakeholders is emphasized throughout the lessons. Murphy concludes with an invitation to the audience to reflect on their learning and the significance of their contributions as they transition from students to practitioners in the field of technology.

00:00:05.540 Hello everyone and welcome to RailsConf University. We're very thankful that you're here today. We know you have a lot of choices in your MBA programs, and many of them are Executive MBA programs where you can continue working while completing your studies.
00:00:12.240 During those programs, you'll learn about finance, accounting, marketing, strategy, and operations. However, those are not the topics we'll cover here at RailsConf University, as our program isn't an Executive MBA program at all. Instead, it's an accelerated MBA program. The way our program is structured is that you give us roughly 30 minutes, and we give you a degree.
00:00:31.260 Now, how are we able to do that? Well, we do that by tailoring our content to very specifically target the needs of a software developer. So, we're going to discuss three different courses from an MBA curriculum that have benefits for a software developer's day-to-day work. My name is Kevin Murphy, and I'm going to be your not actually-a-professor today.
00:01:07.020 These programs work well in cooperation with corporate partnerships, and we thank the Nar Company for their support. They are a software consultancy based out of Boston, Massachusetts. For each of these courses, let's talk about how they're going to be organized. We're going to start by having a lecture component, then we'll move directly into our final exam, and we'll wrap up by discussing our Capstone project.
00:01:35.520 Now, all of our Capstone projects will follow the same format but will be highly individualized. We'll be talking about how this applies to your career. So, let’s put 30 minutes on the clock and get started. Our first topic is situational leadership. Situational leadership is a model that proposes four different styles of leadership, and we're going to discuss what each of those styles is. While doing that, I want you to consider how this could be useful in sprint planning for you.
00:02:09.239 The first leadership style in the Situational Leadership Model is called directing. In that style, the leader is responsible for close, detailed supervision, clearly laying out acceptance criteria and building a checklist that outlines the exact steps needed to achieve success. The part the team plays in the directing style is to faithfully execute that plan. The next style is coaching. In this style, the leader still makes the decisions but spends more time providing background and context, giving more information about why things are done a certain way. The team is encouraged to provide input on how the task is going and how we can tailor it to suit the team's specific needs.
00:03:20.340 The next style is supporting. Here, the role of decision-maker flips; now it's the team responsible for making all the choices regarding how the task will be performed. As such, the leader's role changes drastically. They need to facilitate conversations, ensure everyone knows the right people to contact, keep communication lines open, and empower the team to make decisions. This transition puts them in a position where the leader encourages the team, reminding them that they have the authority to make these decisions.
00:04:51.720 The last leadership style is delegating. In this style, the team has full autonomy over their day-to-day actions. The leader is not checked out; rather, they don’t need to follow up on every single decision. They can focus on the overall vision of the organization or the team without micromanaging. Now that we've covered the four leadership styles in Situational Leadership, it’s time for our final exam.
00:05:41.280 The final exam will consist of one question, and I will give you a minute to think about it before we discuss our answer. The question is: what is the best leadership style? Take a moment to ponder that. (Pause) Let’s come together now. So, what is the best leadership style? It depends.
00:06:14.120 The people who developed the Situational Leadership Model explicitly agree with that by stating that situational leadership is about choosing the right style for the right people. For a leader to be successful, they need to exhibit different styles at different times. If a leader only models one of these styles, they may be successful, but only in particular situations and with specific people.
00:06:37.800 The challenge becomes determining which style of leadership to use in any given scenario. Fortunately, those who built out the framework proposed a solution by evaluating the situation across two axes: how much help the team or individual needs in driving out the tasks that need to be completed, and how much help they need in establishing relationship behaviors, or how much emotional or social support they require to succeed.
00:07:38.760 For example, if someone needs a lot of help understanding the task at hand, directing style should be employed. The leader can provide clear instructions and guide them through the task without overwhelming them with excess information. As the person becomes more familiar with their responsibilities, the leader can start introducing more context using the coaching style to explain why certain tasks are completed in specific ways.
00:08:36.900 Finally, if there’s minimal support needed, we move to the delegating style, allowing the team members to operate freely without micromanagement. You might be listening to this and thinking, 'I'm not a team lead or manager; I don’t have leadership responsibilities. Why should I care about this?' Well, even if you're not in a leadership position, knowing this model can help you manage up, explaining to your leadership team how you need support in particular situations.
00:09:36.720 Moreover, all of us can exhibit leadership qualities in various situations. For instance, in sprint planning meetings, when the team gathers to discuss their commitments for the upcoming sprint, you can utilize the situational Leadership Model to identify how much task help and relationship support each team member needs, which will guide how much assistance you should provide.
00:10:36.780 If you're assigned a ticket and unsure how to proceed, implementing the directing style offers clarity with well-defined instructions and acceptance criteria. Conversely, if a ticket’s details are somewhat vague, the coaching style may be useful, fostering collaboration to assist with the task. When team members are more familiar with their work, a supporting role can empower them to make decisions and navigate stakeholder conversations.
00:12:06.780 As the discussion develops around delegation, team members should practice the self-awareness necessary to identify when they need leadership support, suggesting others who might help. This is especially true in situations where they can enhance the knowledge of colleagues unfamiliar with certain tasks, promoting organization-wide learning.
00:12:57.480 With that, we have completed our first of three courses on situational leadership. Congratulations! We will move on to our next topic, which is competitive advantage. Competitive advantage refers to the way a company or organization achieves success in the marketplace. As we discuss this, consider the question: should we build this feature ourselves?
00:13:30.300 To illustrate competitive advantage, let's consider an example of building a blogging platform and getting users to pay for it. In competitive advantage, we can utilize three distinct strategies to gain market share. The first strategy is cost, which means providing our product or service at a lower price than our competitors. It's an easy idea to suggest, but difficult to implement effectively.
00:14:39.480 To run a business and still turn a profit while providing a more affordable option, we'd need to achieve greater efficiency through various means. This could be by having better personnel, accessing unique technologies, or leveraging lower-cost materials. For instance, if you're a jeweler who owns a gold mine, you could offer your jewelry at lower prices without incurring the costs of sourcing gold externally. However, entering the blogging space poses challenges due to the existence of many free options, making the cost strategy difficult to sustain.
00:16:34.920 The second competitive strategy is differentiation. In this strategy, we provide a product or service that is different or better than what’s available in the market, giving customers a reason to choose us over others. This could be due to unique features, superior quality, or better service. Lastly, we have the focus strategy, which targets a niche market segment and specifically serves its needs.
00:18:07.740 Let’s say we focus on healthcare blogging. We could build specialized features, like a comment moderation system equipped with automation that flags potential HIPAA violations before displaying them on the website. This wouldn't appeal to a typical sports blogger but could be critical for those in healthcare.
00:19:15.780 With these strategies in mind, it's time for our final exam: which competitive strategy will ensure long-term success? The answer, as you might guess, is that it depends. It depends not only on the market and competitors but also on your organization's core competencies.
00:20:47.880 To qualify as a core competency, a capability must meet three criteria: it should provide access to various markets, offer perceived customer benefits (which doesn’t always require it to be better, but rather to be construed as such), and it needs to be hard for competitors to replicate.
00:21:57.420 This brings us back to our original question; we can apply the core competency model to inform our decisions on whether to build a feature ourselves. For example, consider the HIPAA comment moderation system, which seems beneficial across various industries, including healthcare institutions that prioritize compliance. This feature would be arduous for competitors to deploy quickly and efficiently, indicating it supports our core competency, emphasizing that we should develop it internally.
00:23:03.479 Conversely, when considering email notifications related to new comments, engaging an email delivery provider may be more efficient. By leveraging their expertise, we can conserve our resources to focus on developing core strengths, such as the aforementioned HIPAA system. Finally, when it comes to pagination of comments, employing existing libraries or gems can economize our efforts.
00:24:09.420 Having addressed competitive advantages, we now move on to our final course: process management. We will explore how these practices can enhance our efficiency at work. We begin with defining a process. In business, there are numerous definitions; we'll use Dr. Davenport's definition, describing a process as a structured, measured set of activities aimed at producing a specific output. Business process management allows an organization to align its processes with its strategy.
00:25:05.760 For independent practice, start by designing your current processes. Drafting a flowchart helps clarify the sequence - from order placement through approval, fulfillment, and delivery to the customer. Then, propose beneficial changes. The next phase involves modeling, where we conduct what-if analyses to review the proposed changes' impacts. If the analytics show promise, we move into execution with a pilot implementation, gathering data, and analyzing key performance indicators.
00:27:02.760 Our goals are to monitor cycle times and defect rates to gauge process efficacy. Following execution, we engage in optimization, identifying new bottlenecks and focusing on essential areas of improvement. Continuous improvement is vital; after implementing changes, we repeat the evaluation cycle, seeking ongoing enhancement.
00:28:25.920 This brings us to our final exam - what is the optimal automation of our business processes? Again, the encapsulating answer is that it depends. Dr. Hammer, a key figure in process management, argued that automating flawed processes results in automated issues. Emphasizing this perspective leads us to business process re-engineering, which entails a thorough re-examination of current procedures to identify and dismantle outdated assumptions.
00:30:06.240 This process often entails rebuilding from the ground up, prioritizing value creation. Re-engineering became notable in the 1990s, focusing heavily on utilizing shared databases to centralize information across geographies. However, a reflection on Ford's case exemplifies the drawbacks of focusing solely on optimization without considering workforce implications. Although their initiative reduced headcount drastically, it resulted in a waves of layoffs instead of reallocating personnel.
00:31:48.960 The outcome created a cautionary tale. Dr. Davenport stressed that effective process management is rooted in the understanding of human needs. Thus, reflecting on our work, it’s crucial to recognize thevalue we contribute, as this translates into significant real-world impacts—positive and negative.
00:32:55.200 Ultimately, our responsibilities extend far beyond just our immediate tasks and the impacts of our work must be considered holistically. We need to acknowledge and include the perspectives of diverse stakeholders, especially those who may be affected by our systems, even if they are unaware of their existence.
00:35:39.420 Now, we are at the end of our coursework. I’m excited to welcome you all to graduation! As your commencement speaker today, despite not being a celebrity, I want to leave you with an important reflection: technologists and business professionals have far more in common than we initially think.
00:36:26.280 Both fields struggle with naming things effectively, indicating a need for grace and mutual understanding. We rely on abstraction in our crafts, whether through frameworks, design patterns, or individual contributions. Understanding the interconnectedness of our work is essential for pushing for more inclusive and comprehensible communication.
00:37:08.340 I encourage you to review your coursework at kevinjmurphy.com/eng-mba. A lot of concepts were presented quickly, so additional resources for further learning are available. Although this is a virtual graduation with no one physically crossing the stage, I urge you to access the form linked on the site. Completing it will allow you to receive your diploma.
00:38:32.880 The only information required is your name; no identifiers are necessary. Reflecting on this process brings a mix of humor and sincerity, as we're all overwhelmed with communications daily. You could share your diploma on social media and tag me to highlight your experience at RailsConf University today. Congratulations on completing your coursework, and welcome to the alumni network of RailsConf University!
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