Leadership Lessons from Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares

“Restaurants close easily. Especially when the owner isn’t committed 110%” said Gordon Ramsay on a recent episode of BBC’s reality show “Kitchen Nightmares“. My buddy Geoff who is a CIO in the area mentioned this show when we had lunch this week. He told me that this show was a great management training class for IT managers. I was familiar with Gordon Ramsay and his liberal dropping of F-Bombs on other shows but I never really took him seriously as a businessman. After watching two episodes of Kitchen Nightmares, I have changed my opinion of him. He definitely understands how to run a business, which in this case, happens to be restaurants.

For those not familiar with the show, celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay selects a restaurant owner that is about to go out of business and helps them analyze what is causing the failure and helps turn their restaurant around. At least he tries to turn them around. Ultimately, his show is an examination of the leader who runs the business and their failings as a manager. In both episodes I watched this week, the owners had individuals in the kitchen that were disruptive and not taking their jobs seriously. That’s a problem in a restaurant or in an IT department. In both episodes, the manager-employee relationship was skewed. Managers either hired friends or weren’t sure how to manage their staff. Employees didn’t respect their boss and this manifested by tardiness and lack of attention to their job duties. The real losers were the customers.

In the first episode (Ruby Tates), the owner of the business learned from Ramsay how to manage his employees and turned his restaurant around. Sadly, in the second episode (Piccolo Teatro), the other owner didn’t address their own inability to manage the restaurant and the restaurant went out of business. Kitchen Nightmares will not make you cancel your subscription to Harvard Business Review, but it is still a good management tool for watching the effects poor leadership has on a organization. And it’s a lot more entertaining than reading those HBR case studies!

For more information, go to http://www.bbcamerica.com.

Quality Engineering Throughout the SDLC with Gomez

IT Monitoring tools are usually something consumed by techies deep within IT shops and rarely are they discussed within IT and rarer still with the business owners. I’m going to discuss a tool, however, that will change the role monitoring plays in your organization and a tool that will transform your business.

We’ve been using HP/Mercury Business Availability Center for two years at my current company. At AOL, we used everything from OpenView to NetCool to understand our infrastructure. In about ten years of being involved in the evaluation and selection of infrastructure monitoring systems, I’ve never come across a monitoring tool as big a game changer as Gomez’s monitoring software (www.gomez.com).

Depending on where you are on the three stages of the monitoring evolutionary scale, this tool may be more advanced than your company is ready for. I’ll discuss the three types of IT monitoring and then spend the remainder of the article describing synthetic transactions and why I think Gomez is a unique tool to help your entire company not just the IT department.

Three Types of IT Monitoring

1. Link State: This is the most basic form of monitoring. The monitoring system sends a packet every five minutes or so to determine if a physical device is still running. If the device responds to the request, the monitoring systems assume that everything is ok and does not report a fault state for that device. If a device, however, does not respond to the ICMP request, the monitoring system assumes that there is a problem and sends an alert to the administrator that a system or network device is unavailable. The problem with link state monitoring is that it does not attempt to understand if the operating system and services that are running are working properly. The next level of monitoring addresses this deficiency.
2. Process & Services: The next level of monitoring builds upon the link state monitoring capability and provides the IT department a more robust tool for service support. Anybody who has told a customer “the server is up but we’re not sure why the application isn’t responding” knows the value of process and services monitoring. Link state is great for telling IT people that a server is up. Too bad that is pretty worthless for understanding if applications are available. What employees and customers care about is the application that is running on the server that they are trying to reach. Applications running on Unix/Linux use an operating system component called a process. Applications that run on Microsoft Windows servers use a component called a service. Functionally there is no difference between the two. If an employee is attempting to use Microsoft Exchange and it isn’t responding, the MS Exchange service is probably not running or has hung. Process & Services Monitoring looks at these OS components and sends an alert to the administrator when they fail to run properly. In our example, if we are monitoring the Exchange process, we will know immediately when the server has a problem delivering email.
3. Synthetic Transaction: The previous two monitoring states are important and form the foundation of reactive monitoring in IT infrastructure. They are great in helping IT NOCs and engineers respond quickly to support issues but fail to help IT and the business proactively look for tends and potential problems before they arise. Synthetic monitoring actually helps IT and the business come to a common understand of how well the end to end transaction is working. Synthetic transactions simulate actual transactions such as reading a database, retrieving a webpage or authenticating a user session. Each transaction mirrors a real user transaction. Because you can use technology to simulate these transactions, you can now perform them 24×7x365 and use the data to understand when you are having problems. We can look at critical information that was previously unavailable such as average webpage load time, time to pull a record or other customer transactions. If the baseline for a webpage load is normally four seconds and it increases to eight seconds, you know that something has happened in your environment that has doubled the time it takes to load a page. That’s a very bad thing. The IT team can start looking at recent code or infrastructure changes that may have introduced latency into the environment.

Synthetic Monitoring Evolution

Now that we understand the three monitoring stages that IT organizations go through, we have to look at some of the vendors in the synthetic monitoring space and understand how they differ. I have implemented various tools that performed these functions. HP Mercury Business Availability Center is the most recent tool that I have used to baseline our applications and infrastructure. BAC is an excellent tool and provides important insight into how apps and the underlying infrastructure are doing. With BAC you can baseline your apps and look at trends over time to determine the affect of technology and webpage decisions have on site performance. But the fundamental problem with BAC is that it is dependent on the IT team that manages the tool to collect and distribute information about performance as shown in figure 1.

Figure 1: IT Infrastructure creates and distributes reports of limited value

At my current company, our organization has implemented the BAC tool and is also the team responsible for collecting and presenting the information to out stakeholders. We become the gatekeeper and the bottleneck for getting information to people that need to make technical and business decisions. Another problem with this tool is that the development and QA organizations cannot make decisions based on the information they receive. Any actions that arise from the tool are based on inferences from data compiled and disseminated by the infrastructure team. An additional problem pointed is that any requests or changes to the information generated must go through the IT infrastructure team. The Dev, Business Intelligence and Marketing departments have to wait for their requests to be prioritized. This can lead to unnecessary delays that may translate into lost revenue opportunities or poor website performance.

Quality Engineering throughout the SDLC

I once had a client who complained that the environment we managed for them had lower availability than our Mercury BAC tools were telling us. They were using Gomez. Since “the customer is always right”, we worked with them to understand what Gomez was telling them and how it differed from our tools. We successfully addressed a number of internal issues that made our client very happy. In the process, we discovered that their tool was significantly better than ours. There are many tools that provide baselining and benchmarking of your applications. What is different with Gomez is that it looks at the collection of objects on the page and determines which objects are causing the delay in load time. Whereas Mercury BAC did a great job of proving our overall transaction time and availability, it didn’t decompose each object, each call, and each jpg, in a way that would tell us which calls were hampering the customer experience. Gomez measures the transaction times for each step in the sequence so we know where to look immediately for performance improvements.

How would you like to know more about your competitors’ webpage than they do? As part of the benchmarking capabilities, you can compare your website performance to theirs and see if they are more efficient in their page caching or object calling methodologies. Does your business think that site speed is affecting revenue? Find out by baselining your site against your competitors. If you’re faster than your competition, maybe throwing money at website performance won’t solve your problem. Maybe you have design issues that focus groups can help you uncover.

Most synthetic monitoring tools have nodes in data centers throughout the world that reside on the internet backbone. These nodes poll your sites and report response times through their synthetic monitoring. Gomez does this but it does a lot more. In addition to backbone measurements, they have more than 40,000 desktops throughout the world at various internet speeds that also perform monitoring of your site.

In this example, the traditional backbone monitoring would lead you to believe that your site is performing reasonably. It takes 9.7 seconds to load a webpage with an availability of 98.05%. But this is high speed backbone performance (>100mbs throughput) that few people in the world will actually experience. When you look at the traditional DSL customer who is defined as low broadband, we see that the response time more is twice as slow. And if you hope that you can sell to that person still on dial up, they will have to wait over a minute for your page to download. Developers can now work with the business on defining how graphics intensive they want the website to be based on actual load times. You no longer have to guess how your website will perform because Gomez tells you by bandwidth, geography, browser and OS.

Dev and QA can use the BrowserCam feature to select the operating, browser, and screen resolution that they would like to review before they release a new website or page into the production environment. Want to know how customers will view your page running on Windows XP with IE 7 in Los Angeles? No problem. That information and an actual screen rendering are only a few clicks away. Your IT department has the information it needs to know exactly what the finished product will look like when it is delivered to the business owner. And the business owner knows exactly what it will look like when it is released to their customers.

To say that Gomez has the potential to better align the business and IT would be an understatement. In a company that uses Gomez, the consumption model changes from the IT Infrastructure team acting as the gatekeeper and potential bottleneck of information to the many departments being able to directly access the information. Now everyone can access a tool for the purposes unique to their organizational needs. Infrastructure teams can still use it for SLAs and alerting like they always have. But now the QA and Dev teams can use it to develop and test code before it gets to the business or the customer. They will have a wide variety of test tools available to look at how their code will work on various operating systems and browsers. They will be able to test their applications and see how geography affects performance. They will be able to see how bandwidth affects their app also. Marketing and Sales can work with their Business Intelligence or Data Warehouse teams to match the marketing campaigns to a specific geographic market and the most popular browser. Are most of the users in your target market dial up users? If so, you can select to view only performance data based on those users. Dev and the business can work together to design a lightweight website that targets low bandwidth users. There isn’t any guesswork as to what it will look like or how long it will take those pages to load. Gomez tells you exactly what it will look like.

Nice!

A Disruptive Technology

I’ve only touched the surface of the power of Gomez. But the truth is that technology is only one component in successful IT alignment with the business. The other two parts of successful IT alignment with the business are people and processes. This is what potential customers will have to evaluate when the look at Gomez. It is much easier to embrace the past and consume reports from systems like Mercury BAC because it doesn’t require a change in your company’s culture or business processes. Gomez changes everything. Used effectively, people in departments from marketing, business analytics to QA an Dev can now learn how to do their jobs better because of the wealth of information Gomez provides.

Once you get your people committed to the tool, you have to look at your internal processes. If you are a developer or QA manager, you just can’t do things the same once this tool is deployed. You have to embrace it and change your existing SDLC. This will require a reevaluation of your software development lifecycle, your quality assurance processes and your release management function. You’ll be able to deliver with better quality and faster if you do. But you have to change. You just can’t ignore the information that Gomez presents or you are failing to do your job. And that’s why ultimately this is a disruptive technology.

People will have to embrace working tougher differently than they did in the past. People will have to look at their processes and see how they can leverage the tool. If you are the type of person that doesn’t want change your existing way of doing business, or if you think your corporate culture won’t accept reengineering how you design, develop and manage your infrastructure, you probably should pass on this tool. A successful Gomez deployment requires strong leadership from your IT and business executives because it will change the way your company does business.

And for most companies, that’s a very good thing.

More information on Gomez can be found on their website at www.gomez.com

Always Hire People Smarter Than You

I am surprised how frequently I see managers at every level including vice presidents surrounding themselves with people that are less technically competent than themselves. We all were once great technical individual contributors. That’s probably how most of us got our first shot at management. But to develop as a leader, you first have to let go of being a subject matter expert. You must hire people or develop existing staff to take that role. If you insist on being the smartest guy in the room, you will never learn how to grow as a people manager. You will be so busy trying to hold onto your technical expertise that you will stifle the very people who you need to develop so you can be a better leader. This will lead to great frustration within your organization because you will be so busy wearing an old hat that you don’t focus on setting the strategic direction of your department. And by stifling the people on your team, you will lose talented people who don’t see career growth and that causes you to take more control of the technical situation which then leads to greater and greater attrition. This is the true definition of a vicious cycle.

Assess your organization. If you are the leader and the subject matter expert, you are setting up your department for failure.

Your Moral Compass

As a leader or future leader of people, we have to remember a simple fact which is our character is always on display. Last week’s revelation about New York Governor Eliot Spitzer is a prime example of that. There are probably two schools on this issue. One would offer that it was a victimless crime and while illegal, shouldn’t tarnish the works that he has done bringing criminals to justice. The argument would offer that in most situations, he acted beyond reproach. “Why should this incident force him to step down?” people would ask.

The other school, to which I am a student, would offer that a person’s character is shown when people are not looking. In this case, he thought that he was getting away with something. Because he deviated away from leading a moral life, his public career is now over. And let’s not even contemplate what his wife is saying to him right now. She has been publicly humiliated as well. This is caused by what I call situational ethics. Situational ethics is when people believe that morality is relative. They espouse that they can act according to a set of principals in certain business situations, but at other times, it’s ok to bend the truth, mislead people, or act in ways that if revealed would be embarrassing to them.

How do you treat your waitress?

Someone a long time ago told me something that I think about every day. They said that you can tell the character of a person by how they treat their waitress. The point is that people’s true character is exposed when you don’t have to be nice. Everyone has to be nice to their boss. In the corporate world, people are nice to others because they believe they can gain something politically. You don’t have to be nice to your waitress. He or she has no power over you and cannot influence your life. And that’s exactly why people’s character comes out. If you go to lunch with a group of coworkers and you see one of them being rude or abusive to your waiter or waitress, you know all you need to about how that person treats people who don’t have political power to challenge him.

Golf and Ethics

I love golf. I love being out there with friends as well as with coworkers and vendors. It’s a great game and it provides a lot of great experiences. But it is also useful for understanding your character as well as the people playing in your party. Everyone who plays golf knows the old adage, “you learn more about a person in four hours of golf than you do in a year of working side by side with them.” This is an adage that has never failed me when trying to understand the true character of the people I interact with in the corporate world. For those of you who have never thought about the insight you can gain, consider the following next time you are playing with someone for the first time. When they shank the ball into the woods, or if they hit the ball in deep rough, how do they respond? Do they curse and slam their club into the ground? Do they blame the wind, rain, sun, height of the grass, condition of the course, distractions from animals or other external events? Or do they look at what has happened and acknowledge that they were the cause of the poor shot and accept the fate that their swing delivered to them? When they get to their ball and they see that it is a terrible lie, or behind a tree, or out of bounds, do they take their club and give themselves a “foot wedge” by moving the ball into a more favorable spot? I played with a former executive who I knew for a number of years. When I played golf with him, I gained an insight into why other people considered him untrustworthy. On the course, he consistently tried to improve the lie of his ball without regard to the rules of the game. Many times he probably thought that I wasn’t looking. Sometimes he probably didn’t care feeling that he had his own set of rules that he played by regardless of what the overall rules stated about improving your lie. After watching him play golf, I never looked at him the same way again. I also understood the political dynamics at work better thanks to observing him on the golf course.

As leaders, we are always being watched. Everything we do and say is observed by our team, and our company. This extends to happy hours, and other social events as well. You’re always on the clock. Never forget that. Eliot Spitzer thought he was off of the clock when he was secretly wiring tens of thousands of dollars to prostitution rings. He thought he was off the clock when he paid for services while holding the highest office in the state of New York. My former colleague thought he was off the clock when we would routinely cheat at golf.

They were wrong. As leaders and future leaders, we shouldn’t forget these lesson and the importance of being grounded in a moral sense of right and wrong.