Before 8am the symptoms were narrowed to the gall bladder and I was sent for an ultrasound, which found a large gall stone obstructing the duct, and I was admitted. Several courses of morophine later, around 3:30, I was prepped for surgery and the surgeon removed the largest gall stone he had ever seen, over 1″ diameter, as well as the gall bladder.

Fast forward and I have only had one course of painkillers since the op, and am generally comfortable… Except when laughing. Yesterday morning I rented “Cloudy, With A Chance of Meatballs” and was in high-pain within moments of it starting, and had to turn it off after 5 minutes.

As of now, the story is still the same: excellent condition, manageable pain, light bruising, and an inabilty to laugh without excruciating pain.

It’s rare that I quote the US Military, however they know a thing or two about Leaderhship. According to FM 22-100, there are 14 traits to being a good leader (if you’re an NCO or junior officer, you’ll recite LDRSHIP and only count 7. If you’re a senior officer, you’ll just smile). Whether you’re leading troops in combat, a multinational corporation in business, a college through its mission, a department in support of a business, or a team within a department in support of a mission, or even a trek leader on a hike or climb, these traits are the same. They’re not all necessary all the time, nor does an effective Leader need all of them, but the vast majority are critical. While the traits themselves are purloined, the verbiage is original.

Bearing

If your subordinates wear suits, you cannot effectively lead in ripped jeans, a t-shirt, and Birkenstocks. Similarly, you cannot lead effectively if you whine, snivel, complain, or outwardly don’t have your shit together. A Leader is always a Leader… visibly.

Courage

Leadership is not easy, frequently unpopular, and at times more psycho-socially demanding than a human should have to endure. Regardless of this, a good leader can continue moving their group forward through the morass (it’s called “making progress”, by the way) and come out well on the other side. Hiring is easy, firing is not. Maintaining the status quo is easy, progressing into new areas is not. Staying quiet and allowing bad decisions to be made is easy, piping up and providing valid and evidence-driven alternatives is not.

Decisiveness

No one is always right, but in fast-moving situations doing nothing is frequently worse than the wrong thing. If you wait to get 100% of the data needed to see The Big Picture, you may have cost money, time, jobs, advantages, lives- If you have 20% and it’s actionable, go for it. If you get another 20% later and need to correct the course, do it. If you get another 20% and need to turn around, fine. Leadership is experience and data -driven. Sitting around and waiting for the mythical Right Decision to float to the top is folly.

Dependability

I know a lot of brilliant, wonderful humans who cannot effectively lead because of the inability for their subordinates and other leaders, to understand what it is they will expect. Sometimes a 1-page report suffices, sometimes they want a 30-page exegesis. Do you respect teammates who are inconsistent, can’t meet deadlines, make excuses, fail to take responsibility, or get vociferously defensive when challenged? So why would your subordinates appreciate those skills in their Leader? It’s always your fault, it’s always your job to get the deadlines met, it’s always your job to be clear about your requirements, excuses are irrelevant.

Endurance

An effective Leader puts in just as much time as their most overworked subordinate. If you have minions working 70 hour weeks, you better be there 10 minutes before they get in and leave 20 minutes after they do. Every. Day. Effective Leadership depends on respect, and one of the quickest ways to lose it is to work a 9-to-5 when your minions are working overtime. If they’re there, you’re there too. If you’re not in a position to be helpful, go out and bring back some food and drinks for the overworked crew, and show them some…

Enthusiasm

If you’re miserable, combative, and don’t want to be at work or do your job, how can you expect your subordinates to be any different? Problems at home or with health get left at the door. You have to appear completely operational, and with Leadership Bearing every day. Every. Day. You are your team’s cheerleader as much as their coach.

Initiative

You may be blessed with proactive subordinates who are constantly looking at new things the unit can do, or new ways of doing old things. Whether you can leverage that blessing or need to provide the same, looking for new (and ostensibly better) ways of accomplishing the mission are critical. This also contributes to retention-by-challenge, that I’ll talk about later.

Integrity

Sharing group credit, providing honest insight, and ensuring your crew understands your decisions are for the good of the whole and not yourself, all play into earning subordinate respect. Being a credit whore, lying about specifications, clearly generating work for the group that serves no or little purpose other than making your job easier, don’t earn you anything positive.

Judgment

In combination with Decisiveness, it is imperative that the decisions you make are sound. Even if they end up resulting in a negative outcome, the reasons and the information you used to come to that decision need to be obviously logical. Your subordinates should be able to believe that the decisions you’re making will not end up costing them, and solve problems.

Justice

Frequently, working relationships overlap with personal relationships. You may spend off-time playing sports with some of your subordinates, attending social functions, whatever. Group cohesion and morale will suffer irreparably if there is a hint of professional favoritism among subordinates. Similarly, putting an undue burden on a subset of your subordinates for questionable reasons (race, creed, sexual orientation, gender, etc. etc.) or because of exclusion (they don’t play golf with you, therefore…) will shred your credibility and significantly impact your effectiveness.

Knowledge

If there’s one trait I talk about over and over and over again, it is knowledge. Knowledge is what you know, not what you can find. If you can’t get through your workday without asking The Internet for help, you have insufficient knowledge to do your job, are mediocre at best, and much worse if you’re in a Leadership position. Using The Internet, or a book, or a colleague to acquire knowledge (a process we call “learning”) is perfectly fine, generally when you’re not being paid and only occasionally when you are.

Loyalty

One of the hardest things an effective Leader has to do, is break up their unit. Whether it’s a firing, or a punitive division, effective Leaders will be beside themselves leading up to these decisions. Not because they want everyone to like them, or they don’t like “being the bad guy”, but because this is an expression of the deepest betrayal of unit loyalty if done without sound judgment. That said, if the unit is floundering because of irresponsible, inept, or unbecoming members, failure to act is similarly treasonous. Also, publicly defending your unit in times of trouble to superiors, other leaders and/or customers is critical. Your subordinates need to understandyou will stand up for them when the chips are down, within reason.

Tact

If there was one Leadership Trait I have never cared much for, it is tact. Tact, generally, borders on dishonesty. It’s a way of sparing feelings at the cost of logic and full-disclosure. As a Leader, inevitably someone will come to you with the most brain-dead idea you’ve ever heard, and you shouldn’t tell them that. You should guide them in a better direction, point out some things perhaps they could look into. I frequently fail at this. Tact is inefficient and generates work, and those sins I can generally never condone.

Unselfishness

Several times above I’ve talked about the importance of subordinate perception of your reasons. Effective Leadership is never Machiavellian, but should be transparently altruistic. Every command should help accomplish the group mission. Every punishment, for the betterment of the punished. Every assignment, a piece of progress. With delegation there will always be an aspect of making your job “easier”, but the perception of the delegation must be one of optimal assignment or division of labor, and not “hey, go do this so I can make my tee-time”.

Respect and Retention

That’s the list of what you need. I have never met an effective Leader that didn’t have visibly strong manifestations of 11-12 of those qualities, a decent leader with less than 10, or a mediocre manager with less than 8. They’re all within every single person. There’s no magic, there’s no particular -ology you have to take in college to acquire them, you just have to commit yourself to being an effective Leader.

So, now you’ve become a Great Leader, and have subordinates who respect you because you embody a whopping thirteen of the aforementioned traits: How do you retain the respect, and the employ, of your subordinates?

Autonomy

While some will disagree, the term “micromanagement” is not a positive form of governance. If you over-direct your crew to the point that they don’t feel empowered to make even trivial decisions without talking to you first, they’re going to rot. It doesn’t matter how amazing of a decision-maker you are, you need to foster independence and interdependence within your group, and get yourself out of the hour-to-hour, and even the day-to-day, decisions of your group. Sufficient autonomy promotes satisfaction that they are contributing in a useful way, and not just a tool in your toolbox.

Obviously, some people need correction and structure – hopefully just temporarily. Assuming they’re not incapable and you’re effective, they should be able to figure out the difference between a good decision and a bad decision, and toddle along progressively more independently. If not, perhaps they need reassignment or termination.

Challenge

Even the laziest, least ambitious member of your crew will claim utter job dissatisfaction if they don’t have sufficient challenge or complexity in their duties. The key thing is sufficient. Too much, and you’ll end up with a puddle of inefficient goop in a chair.

Minions who respond well to challenge and complexity should be groomed for Leadership. As an effective Leader, you should give them duties or assignments that help them build up their 14 Leadership Traits over time.

Purpose

Some psychology and communication knowledge help a lot with this, but simply you must foster a sense of purpose in your subordinates. The studies of B.F. Skinner are invaluable in understanding what makes [people] tick, but nothing is more important than a visible and fair system whereby efforts leading to success result in tangible rewards.

Efforts. Leading to success. Result in tangible rewards.

As an effective Leader, you are probably either a member of management or have a significant advisory capacity with management. Giving/recommending raises and promotions are certainly the most common tangible rewards you can offer. Giving someone a lapel pin and a laser-printed piece of paper after staying employed for 10 years is cute, but fairly worthless. It is a valid uniform recognition of service, don’t get me wrong, but it is insufficient for this discussion.

Other very effective rewards include extra paid time-off, inclusion in advisory processes, preferred parking or prominent commendation (akin to the “employee of the month” fiascoes some businesses use), and chairmanship of committees-of-import to the subordinate. Even a one-off invitation to some activity with other senior staff whom they may normally have no access to, can be a valuable “thank you”.

Some subordinates are and will be happy doing whatever it is they do, forever. Their purpose is to collect a paycheck and that’s it. Many, however, want to do new things, and want a path “up”- More responsibility; More trust; More money; More autonomy; More challenge; More purpose – and an effective Leader should help parlay the ambitions of the capable into the building of another effective Leader for tomorrow.

I’ve long considered removing my lawn altogether and replace it with a rock garden. A nice one, very Zen. I talked to a friend/lawyer who advised me against it, citing more ordinances and that I’d need a building permit that they would certainly reject. I asked him what they’d do if I just dumped grass killer on my front lawn: They’d make me reseed it.

Our geriatric government is insistent on destroying our planet and wallets, over vanity. That’s all a “maintained lawn” is, vanity. This blurb was purloined wholesale from this /. post, the last quote is priceless.

“The LA Times reports that Orange County officials are locked in a legal battle with a couple accused of violating city ordinances for replacing the grass on their lawn with wood chips and drought-tolerant plants, reducing their water usage from 299,221 gallons in 2007 to 58,348 gallons in 2009. The dispute began two years ago, when Quan and Angelina Ha tore out the grass in their front yard. In drought-plagued Southern California, the couple said, the lush grass had been soaking up tens of thousands of gallons of water — and hundreds of dollars — each year. ‘We’ve got a newborn, so we want to start worrying about her future,’ said Quan Ha, an information technology manager for Kelley Blue Book. But city officials told the Has they were violating several city laws that require that 40% of residential yards to be landscaped predominantly with live plants. Last summer, the couple tried to appease the city by building a fence around the yard and planting drought-tolerant greenery — lavender, rosemary, horsetail, and pittosporum, among others. But according to the city, their landscaping still did not comply with city standards. At the end of January, the Has received a letter saying they had been charged with a misdemeanor violation and must appear in court. The couple could face a maximum penalty of six months in jail and a $1,000 fine for their grass-free, eco-friendly landscaping scheme. ‘It’s just funny that we pay our taxes to the city and the city is now prosecuting us with our own money,’ says Quan Ha.”

c1998, in the northern woods of Norfolk (Raymondville), I saw similar high-tree shredding and a gutted whitetail deer hanging across a branch 15-20 feet up. There was no question in my mind that it was a cougar – nothing else could (or would) carry a doe that far up a tree. I brought a friend of mine to the site two days later and the carcass was gone, but the site reeked of a very strong urine and there was still some deer hair and blood up in the tree.

When you omit the sound judgment, however, you didn’t have an accident anymore, you have generated work. In the world of geeks, accidents are things everyone laughs about after the fact, generating work will usually result in no one laughing with you ever again. Time is precious, respect doubly so, and making a bad decision that costs others’ cycles consumes both.

For the last few weeks, we’ve had some electrical contractors in our office building replacing our 1970s-vintage fire alarm system with something modern. Observing their group dynamics was fascinating, and reinforced the same principles. Some guy who set off the alarm system twice in one morning because of bad decisions wasn’t invited back after a couple days. Another guy who checkpointed his thoughts with the more seasoned crew before blundering was given more leeway. A third who didn’t seem to know how to do his job, and was constantly requesting help and making bad decisions requiring others to fix his shit, was asked at one point “are you really an electrician?” and generally ostracized by the senior crew.

I am a firm believer in the old adage “there are no stupid questions”. Without hesitation I offer my time to all sorts of people who are interested in learning, check-pointing, advancing or honing their knowledge in an array of topics. I enjoy pedagogy and dialogue: Most seasoned, polydisciplinaries do, especially those who are also autodidacts. Form intelligent questions, ask intelligent questions, save your reputation, expand your knowledge, develop sounder judgment, don’t generate work. Ask.

My first thought was virus/malware. I don’t actively run anti-virus software on that system as I’m not a click-whore, and at home am behind an impregnable firewall. So I rebooted onto a rescue CD from F-Secure that runs linux and scans drives for the icky things most mortals fear, as well as looks at drive health (SMART), and picked up a book. Two-hours later, clean, but it noted some filesystem damage.

Great. I rebooted onto the Windows 7 install cd, which has an excellent recover/repair toolset including my favorite option: Command Prompt.

<tangent> I rue the increasing loss of control that consumers have over their computing devices. Increasingly corporate machines are forcing us to compute how they want, not giving us an operating system but rather a jail under the guise of keeping us safe from the “bad things” out there. Apple has taken this so far with the iPhone and now iPad (giggling) that you are UNABLE to install anything they haven’t approved and/or isn’t in their “store”. This isn’t to keep uSheep “safe”, it’s to control content and continue to profit by force, by 100% preventing competition. It’s a parasitic arrangement that uSheep and they have, and it is counter to every principle that helped build personal computing into what it is today. These disgusting tactics tug hard at the very fabrics of curiosity and innovation, stifling both while claiming to be their champion. Apple: We innovate, so you can’t. </tangent>

So, I’ve got a command prompt now, and run a chkdsk /f to find and fix logical errors, pick up a book and wait. A couple hours later, some indexes fixed, some orphans reconnected with their parents, but nothing obviously amazing. Reboot. Same problem. I reboot back onto the install CD and again wake my minion Command Prompt, and tell it to do something vile: chkdsk /r. *gasps, the sounds of doom everywhere*

The chkdsk tool is a lot like some fantasy-novel magic item: it can be used for great good, or great evil. It has been this way since DOS was your operating system. The /r option may very well hose your drive. R is not for “repair” or some similarly encouraging verb, but for “relocate”. It looks at the disk logically like /f, but after all that it looks at it physically, and relocates data on bad clusters to good clusters, ostensibly.

This may sound encouraging to you, dear reader, but let me help frame this with allegory: You have a plate covered with poop, and on that plate is some fruit. You relocate that fruit to another clean plate. Is all of the fruit still edible? Hell, is any of the fruit edible?! Tis the same with bad clusters: not all the bits in the bad cluster can be moved, thus corrupting files irrecoverably.

So I unleashed the Eater of Files on my drive, picked up my book, and waited. After 3 hours it started finding some serious problems, and commenced eating bits (or moving fecally-enhanced fruit, if you prefer). Three-hours after that it finished. I rebooted, asked the God of Bits for favor, and was not disappointed. Everything was very fast, and the only noticeable blowback was that software I use to control my computer via remote control (IMON) and Acrobat Reader were horribly damaged, and will need to be reinstalled.

But I got a lot of unexpected reading accomplished, so 11 hours was not wasted at all, just relocated.

“Hot on the heels of the story in Publisher’s Weekly that ‘publishers could be losing out on as much $3 billion to online book piracy’ comes a sudden realization of a much larger threat to the viability of the book industry. Apparently, over 2 billion books were ‘loaned’ last year by a cabal of organizations found in nearly every American city and town. Using the same advanced projective mathematics used in the study cited by Publishers Weekly, Go To Hellman has computed that publishers could be losing sales opportunities totaling over $100 billion per year, losses which extend back to at least the year 2000. … From what we’ve been able to piece together, the book ‘lending’ takes place in ‘libraries.’ On entering one of these dens, patrons may view a dazzling array of books, periodicals, even CDs and DVDs, all available to anyone willing to disclose valuable personal information in exchange for a ‘card.’ But there is an ominous silence pervading these ersatz sanctuaries, enforced by the stern demeanor of staff and the glares of other patrons. Although there’s no admission charge and it doesn’t cost anything to borrow a book, there’s always the threat of an onerous overdue bill for the hapless borrower who forgets to continue the cycle of not paying for copyrighted material.”

Today, and for the last several years, we’ve heard more and more about “identity theft” because the words alone invoke fear. Companies make billions (yes, billions) of dollars off of your fear of “identity theft” for no reason other than that the words are scary. Someone has stolen my identity! That’s a scary thing. Thankfully it won’t happen. What does happen, and what the marketing engine tries to deflect, is fraud. Yup. There’s a not-scary word. That’s the word that the financial industry has used since the 1300’s to describe deceit and trickery for financial gain. Fraud. Someone has lied to someone else, and claimed to be you. That someone else didn’t do a good job making sure you are really you, and thus a fraud occurred. They didn’t steal your identity, they lied.

Besides making tons of money by propagating fear, it also deflects where the blame actually belongs. There are three parties involved: you, the fraudster, and your financial institution(s). You are the victim, we agree; he fraudster a liar; your financial institution … hmmm… why aren’t they doing a better job at protecting your assets/credit/reputation? Why are they believing the lie? Why are they complicit in the fraud? Because it’s cheaper to allow fraud than to defend against it. That’s the bottom line. The financial services industry is scaring you with the idea “identity theft” so that they can make money selling you garbage “identity theft protection” instead of doing their job and protecting your assets/credit/reputation from fraud. Period.

Avoidance scenarios in code are often completely unnecessary and several orders more complex than handling the inevitable exception to begin with. The simplest solution is almost always the best, and always the best when you can’t rely on your avoidance strategy to begin with! If your program calls some code, and expects to get back a 0 or 1, what happens when it gets a 2? What happens when some field in a database you flagged as never null (an avoidance) is null for some records?

Avoidance is about assumptions. A lot of programmers love assumptions, they code for them often, sometimes even writing comments in their code “the blahblah field is set to ‘never null’ so we can assume that to be true” – Really? Until an admin turns off constraints and bulk loads some “bad” data. Instead of writing the cheeky comment making the assumption, you could have written a one-line handler to Do The Right Thing. If you toss what you think you know out the window, program with the facts in mind, and handle failure cases elegantly, you end up with a durable system.

Your system application sends a file from one system to another every day. Usually it works, sometimes it doesn’t. When it doesn’t, what happens? Nothing, because you never coded for that eventuality. Why would you? It’s not your fault if the other side doesn’t work, after all. Your code is perfect. The intelligent handling to this is two lines of code: after you send the file, check to make sure the file is actually on the other end, and retry if it’s not (or send you an e-mail, or write something to a log… SOMETHING). I can list over 60 different reasons that file may not be on the other side- you can add mitigators for those 60 reasons (plus the other 60 I didn’t bother thinking of), or you can intelligently handle the problem with two lines of code, actually, zero lines if you’re elegant.

SendFile(fileName,fromHere,toThere)

could be replaced with:

until(FileExists(“toThere/fileName”)) { SendFile(fileName,fromHere,toThere); }

That’s pseudo-code (‘until( .. )’ is the same as ‘while(not .. )’, if you’re using a primitive language) but it will work semantically the same in at least 16 different programming languages. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to figure out why it’s failing and perhaps fix something that’s broken along the way, but your code doesn’t need that complexity, it just needs to Do The Right Thing.

Another classic example is how one handles multiple instances. Some software runs fine with multiple copies (like your web browser) some behave badly (like your e-mail client), some even worse. Frequently, even when they know that running two or more instances at the same time is very very bad  (will-destroy-data bad), they don’t handle that event, they avoid it. They say “well the code runs via a scheduler, and there’s enough time in-between runs that it should be done”. Should. You may destroy data and cause more work, for a “should”. The handler is a 2-line fix:

open ME, “<$0″ or exit;
flock ME, LOCK_EX | LOCK_NB or exit;

Lock yourself, and exit if you can’t get a lock. If locking yourself seems too conceptually scary, then pick a lock file (that’s what the /var/lock subsystem is for, by the way) and lock on that. The code is Perl, but the concept will work in at least a dozen different languages, and is bullet-proof (assuming your host OS supports flock).

There are a lot of reasons people don’t write durable programs- I don’t pretend to do it all of the time, either. Laziness and ignorance are probably tied for first, followed closely by apathy.  If your system is “critical” (to you, or someone else) and if/when it doesn’t function it generates work, there is almost always a 1-to-2 line solution to help it survive, or at the very least, not do the wrong thing.