Riehm's Rules - All Ten

I skipped rule 6 in my last post, because I had apparently lost track of the count.  It gave me an opportunity to revisit my rules in light of my more recent experience. I had thought of adding Rule 5 "Simulate Concern." But that only has situational applicability, and was already taken by someone else.  Besides, I need a rule 6.  Here is the new list.

1.  Plan to do nothing, and you will certainly achieve your goals.
2.  Management is hard, leadership is better and supervision is most difficult of all. Corollary: Hire people who don't need supervision.
3.  Hiring is the manager's most important decision.
4.  Stay on message. Communicate consistently. Repeat your theme repetitively.
5.  The commodity in shortest supply is management attention. Corollary 1: The most important word in a manager's vocabulary is "no." Corollary 2: Email is an evil leach of your time.
6.  Don't fight market forces.
7.  Understand your firm's economic engine and your unit's.
8.  Be careful what you ask for, you just might get it.
9.  Deliver the bad news yourself, let your people deliver the good news.
10. If you can't cover yourself in glory, cover yourself in paper.

Not fighting market forces can have different meanings, depending on your organizational context. Two key elements stand out.

1. Broad market forces are going to drive technology available for you to conduct business. That's obvious but bears repeating, I often see arguments for using the "better technology," but if no industrial base exists in five years to support the choice, it wasn't a good choice.  Managers also have to show some common sense regarding technology trends.  One example, you can expect a mutually reinforcing cycle of operating system upgrades and hardware upgrades to be required of all your embedded technology, not just your laptop.  This means we should lean forward to be at the high end of the state of the shelf to avoid technology obsolescence, announced or otherwise.

2. Your organization is an ecosystem with market forces of its own. Attempting to force fit new technical solutions, except when absolutely necessary, is another way we can be fighting market forces.  We make more allies within our organization and deliver faster with lower sustainment costs when we cause the already delivered enterprise solutions to be modified rather trying to bypass them.  For a seemingly ludicrous example, the Department of Defense has been billions on a public key infrastructure technology.  There are occasions when the technology doesn't fit a particular use case. But reverting to user name and password log delivers low security that will either cost a lot due to a breach or cost a lot when the organization directs an upgrade.

Next up. Start outlining all of the rules in a more rational order.