Improving performance

- It's very simple to think that we can improve performance by just hiring better people. But if there's one thing that the NUMMI case study should tell us, it's that individual effects are overwhelmed by systemic effects. W. Edwards Deming said once that a bad system will beat a good person every time. What happens if you hire great people into crappy systems is you break the people. Conversely, Adrian Cockcroft, one of the originators of cloud computing at scale who is the cloud architect at Netflix, he would go and give talks at a number of large companies, and the executives would come to Adrian and say, "Adrian, where to you get your amazing people?" And Adrian would turn around and say to them, "I get them from you." Because guess what? It's the system that's important, not the people. We're used to thinking that we improve performance by hiring brilliant people. There's a great article by Malcolm Gladwell which refutes this by talking about the case of Enron. Enron famously was…