The Seven Habits of highly Effective People

This is the book mocked in dozens of Dilbert strips. But in fact, most of what its author, Stephen R. Covey says is better than the usual self-hyping success books have to say. I sum it up here.

Introduction and PC/P

Learn and work. The basic premise is that lying to yourself and trying some
recipice for personal and public success won't work out. The only way to have a meaningful life is to put work into it, and to try and be a decent person. There are no free shots and cheap victories. If you want something good and valuable, you have to earnestly work for it. Private victory precedes public victory. You need to conquer yourself to be able to conquer the world. At the center of effectiveness is the balance between production capability (PC, learning, improvements, maintenance) and production (P, output, productive work). Most people only look at P and miss the point that, if you do not invest into PC, P will deteriorate. If you only improve PC, it is useless theory. The art is to find the right balance, producing as much good stuff as you can, while not losing the capability to do so.

Habit Seven: Sharpen the saw

This habit talks about the PC/P balance mentioned in the introduction. I'm not sure why it comes last in the book, it seems to fit better in the beginning, since this investing time in personal improvement is the base to make all the other habits work. So I put it here. Basically it says that you yourself are all you have, and you should care for your health and wellness. You should invest at least one hour per day for your personal "maintenance". There are four basic areas to cover:

• Physical. Keep fit, do some sports, do not neglect your bodies' health, since without it nothing will work. Stretch, do not eat unhealthy food too often, do not take drugs or smoke, clean yourself.
• Mental. Learn something, read something intellectually stimulating, plan your day, do not kill your time with TV.
• Cultural. Do something for your soul, be it reading novels, going to the theatre, pray, listen to music, take a long walk in nature.
• Social. Remember the ones you love, write them, call them, talk to them think about them and how you could make them happy.

PRIVATE VICTORY

Habit One: Be proactive

Terminator II - Judgement Day: The future is not set. Face it: You make your life. You decide what happens with your life, you alone are responsible for yourself. Many people hide away from this responsibility, blaming "the circumstances" on what their life is like. They let others decide for them, act on them. Try to fulfill other's image of their life. They feel they have no control. But this is not true. You are the master of your destiny. Of course, there are things you cannot control. There is is an area of concern, things which are important for your life, and an area of influence, things you can influence through your actions. And some of the things concerning you are beyond your influence. But this is no reason to despair and lose initiative. Go and work on that which you can influence, and you can dramatically change the course of your life. You can learn to work hard, even if you are lazy, you just have to want it. You can learn to be considerate, even if you are an antisocial brat, you just have to want it.

Habit Two: Begin With the End in Mind

The one thing that can stop you to lead the life you want, even if you are no coward an accept it's your fault if you do not, is that you do not know which life you want. So think about what your goals in life are, what you'd like your life to have been like at the end. Write this down in a document. If you have no goals, you can not reach any. Decide what is important for you. You need a goal. You then can break down this big goal into smaller ones, and work every day to achieve them.

Habit Three: Put First Things First

Time limits what you can do. Most people are weak and give in to every whim, satisfying direct desires, even if it doesn't help with their goals for life. And if you give in and devote time for unimportant things, you will have lost it for the important ones. Time is limited and easily squandered. Do important things first, even when they are unpleasant. This self-conquering is what separates successful people from others. Also, you should not let yourself be controlled by outside forces. He categorizes activities in 4 quadrants.
Basically spend your time on the important ones. Then you get something done, and you will have no time for unimportant ones. But spend it on the unimportant ones (which is often way easier), and you will not have time for important ones and get nowhere. Preferably spend it on Quadrant II activities, and the horrible Quadrant I things will vanish with time. Invest your time in improving your production capability. Do not let unimportant outside forces get in the way - say no.

	Urgent	Not Urgent
Important	[Quadrant I] Crises Deadlines	[Quadrant II] Relationship building Planning Preparation Improvements Learning
Not Important	[Quadrant III] Calls Interruptions Reports Meetings	[Quadrant IV] Time Wasters Junk mail & calls Pleasant activities

PUBLIC VICTORY

Habit Four: Think Win/Win

When dealing with other people, make deals which benefit both of you. Do not exploit others, or they will not come back again. Obviously, do not let yourself be exploited. Trust is established only over time when you realize you deal with someone responsible and fair. Since everybodies interests are a bit different, you can find a solution which benfits both. Many people think nice and tough is mutually exclusive. No. Win/Win is both nice and tough.

Habit Five: Try to understand, then to be understood

If you earnestly try to understand someone, he feels you are valueing him and his opinion. This makes it possible for him to open up, instead of being defensive. To understand someone else, you have to listen emphatically to him. Try to understand what he feels and what he thinks. You restate his feelings and ideas to him, to make sure you have understood. If you truely understand, you will be able to see his side, too. It doesn't mean you have to give up your values. You can still have a different opinion, but you at least consider other opinions, and sometimes both of you will reach a new insight which surpasses what you thought before.

Habit Six: Synergize

This habit can be summarized as: appreciate and accept people as they are - there are no others. Synergy is just a bad word for the positive effect that comes from this sober view of the world. But if you think that there are only two opinions, your opinion and the wrong one, you will not get very far with other people. You will always feel you are right and they are wrong, that they should change. Which of course they won't and you'll get angry and frustrated in no time about how bad and unfair the world is to you. Lighten up: the world isn't here for you. It was here before and will be here after you are gone. It owes you nothing. So if you want to live in it, show a little respect. You can only change yourself.

Learning

"10. Get into a rut early: Do the same processes the same way. Accumulate idioms. Standardize. The only difference (!) between Shakespeare and you was the size of his idiom list - not the size of his vocabulary. " -Alan Perlis


Thinking about how you spend your time is worthwhile. As a legitimation for this document, this is the first rule. Just like Paracelsus said, though, "The dose makes the poison". Spend too much time just planning how to become efficient, and there will not be enough time left to really be efficient.

Stay open

To expand your knowledge and understanding, you need to do three things. If you do not even know of a solution, you cannot learn how to use it. Therefore, it is important to snoop around and widen your horizon. Stay informed. The most effective way to do this I know of is reading domain journals like c't. Journals have lots of staff, who do nothing else than look around for new products, methods and technologies, and filter the interesting ones for easy consumption. Of course formal training like visiting a university, can be very helpful here, too. There you are fed preselected information to give you an overview. Conferences are another good way to learn about new developments. As are twitter feeds of eminent people in the field. The limiting resource here as everywhere is time. Getting informed and snooping around can usually be done as a spare time activity, but will take more then half a day per week.

There may be some solution that is so far out that nobody else in the world before tried to apply it to your problem, like it was the case at some time with Markov models, or the application of genetics to programming in genetic algorithms. To be able to discover something like that, you have to think laterally and also have interests different from your problem field.

Learn from masters

Any first idea you get on how to solve something you do not know anything about, will be naive. There you go, programming a bubblesort, since you never heard of quicksort or heapsort. You can save lots of time, get better results and deepen your insights by looking on how some wizard did that stuff. It helps immensely if you have masterful works to inspire you and help direct you in your practice. One has to stand upon the shoulders of giants to achieve something in a field that is complicated and large. And contrary to Perlis' epigramm, you should sometimes try to change your behaviour patterns if there is a better way to do it.

Practice

Then you have to practice, practice, practice, to understand why he did things that way and not another way. All real understanding comes from practice. There's a German proverb: "Übung macht den Meister." (Practice makes perfect.)

You learn best by solving problems. You learn programming by programming and examining how good programmers program. Another excellent review on learning to learn is Peter Norvig's page. The bottom line is, that you are learning the best if what you do is fun and if you learn to solve a direct problem - problem oriented learning. When you are working on a project you'll experience problems. Since you want to solve the direct problem, you understand the problem, and you are highly motivated to learn and understand what to do to tackle it.

I read through general Unix books several times, and still I do not really have a good grasp on Unix. Because without really working much on Unix I never knew what of all this stuff was really of practical use for me in my day to day work, what to watch out for. Also without a direct application, the urge to really understand something complex was not big enough - I just skimmed over the difficult parts, never gaining real insight. The mind is not so easily fooled and protests to remember lots of probably irrelevant detail. I learned much more about Unix just by looking over the shoulder of my co-worker, the great INGMAR, for two hours. Because what he did and used was the stuff that you really needed.

Focus

You cannot learn everything. Just poring through books and more books doesn't give you real knowledge. There is much more knowledge printed than you ever could read, much less remember. I still sometimes fall into the book trap, losing touch with my actual work and thereby learning less, slower and wasting time. That's not to say books are bad, they help you get started on a subject, and help you look things up, when you need them. But you need something to help you focus. You cannot learn everything. You have to select the important stuff and concentrate on that. Having a goal helps you to select.

There is a saying from Goethe, the great German writer: "Ein Mann, der recht zu wirken denkt, muss auf das beste Werkzeug halten." ("A man that wants to be effective, has to use the best tools.") It is often worth to invest the time and learn using a good tool, since the tool will make you much more productive. How to find the best tools? Just look what the gurus are using. In hacker culture, these are to a large extent open source free software tools.

One of the problems is that the tools on Windows and Unix are so different. When I switched from NT, Java, Textpad/VisualCafe to Unix, Perl, Emacs to write a small script, it took me a whole day, since suddenly I had to use other key bindings, other language syntax etc. Again, focus on one set of tools, get used to it.

Play

Creativity and fun are important. Half of your brain is concerned with associative, wholistic thinking. Normally in school you are taught to use only the other, logical, analytic half. But memory doesn't work analytically, it works by connecting and associating things, thus giving them a relation to live in. Just think about how much easier it is to remember emotionally important stuff than technical facts. Just observe how much faster you learn by playing around and having fun with what you do. Actually, enjoying your work should always be the highest priority on your list.

First Things First

... second things never. You get work done fast by doing the work that has to be done. IT'S THAT SIMPLE. It is very easy to get distracted by all the marvellous toys that are out there, and many of which probably are even worth looking at, like compiler compilers, how compilers work, metadata, grammars etc. All of these, if mastered might make it possible to do your work in a much better way - but mastering them, or even grasping the concepts, takes time. Time you will not spend on your actual work, which won't progress. And without the feedback of work, what you look at cannot be truly understood. So it comes down to this simple phrase (which I saw in the film "My name is Joe", pinned to the kitchen cupboard of an alcoholic). Spend too much time on learning, and there will be no time to be productive. Spend too much time on production, and you will waste it because there would be a better way. (See PC/P balance.)

Here is an interesting story by a real programmer, jwz, about working. What I learned from checking his site is something I realised also from reading Feynman's "Surely you are joking, Mr. Feynman": these guys were or are great because of a) their huge minds and b) working on their stuff, instead of reading educated articles about how one should work, or reading biographies about other great men (or women) and how they did it. I can try that, too. Knowledge is personal, so is thinking. You have to find your own way. The only way to learn programming is programming. I also get the impression that jwz separates his work strictly from his other activities, like private hacks, writing etc. Good idea.

Get organized*

Structure your work processes and data. You can sort all of your working activities into three domains: productive work, learning, and administrative work. I think it is best to try to go into batch mode (to borrow that idea from Don Knuth) and do only one of those at the time. Of course this is often not easy, but improves productivity. Start with productive work until you get tired. Then it might be a good time to browse a bit, read up on news and when you are a bit refreshed, go on to learning (about the things you encountered during the working part). Don't do the administrative stuff early in the morning "to get it out of the way", do it in the evening, or it will eat up your whole day (downloading, communication, planning). The meta stuff (reflecting on what you do) can be in between but updating documents such as this should be done on the weekend.

Try to structure your data and work processes, so you do not have to spend time re-thinking stuff you thought about before. Organise your information, so you do not have to search for that address again etc.

When I was back in school I thought people that used index cards were idiots. I just wrote everything neatly down into my notebook, at the end of the year I'd have a nice book on linear algebra for example. If I wanted to look something up later, I just got the book and there it was. Right at my fingertips. Others wrote everything into one big binder, to "sort it out" later, and of course, most of the time nothing got sorted, everything was mixed up, and you couldn't find anything anymore.

Unfortunately I had to discover, that this plan only works while in school: there you get all the information pre-ordered. In real life, you work on a lot of things and piece stuff together all the time. The order of incoming information is not well structured, and so you are often forced to restructure your notes later. You always should try to reuse your notes, on the principle that if you don't, what were they good for in the first place. You will just write that same stuff down again? Because of that, it is much better to use ring binders, where you can resort the sheets or even better yet, computer files. Also, even if you have all the information reorganisable, you should create a central repository.

I tried several planning systems (a la filofax) and none of them worked for me. I'd start out with a burst of filled days, then nothing else follows. I thought that probably I'm just too undisciplined to use them, until I discovered Getting Things Done. I also learned that if it's bigger than my pocket, I won't take it everywhere and it will be useless. Now, in the age of smartphones, you can always have your calendar and contacts and notes with you.

When working with the computer, look out for repetitive tasks that eat up time. It might be worth to automate them with a small shell or perl script, if possible.

Example work distribution during my Ph.D.:

PRODUCTIVE	LEARNING	ADMINISTRATIVE
programming, debugging documenting and application design	staying up-to-date on news, products, technology discussions learning usage of tools, protocols, programming techniques	communicating with programmers, collegues, vendors ordering stuff, filling out forms meta-work, planning and reflection like this downloading stuff meetings

Learn from mistakes

Do not repeat useless actions. To learn the right things, you first have to understand what the problem is. You have to ask yourself the right question, have to limit the options. Maybe in the very beginning when you do not have enough information to see what is important at all, you have to just skim around, looking here and there, until some kind of map builds up in your mind. It will do this automatically, don't worry about it. Your brain will do this for you. Then, when you recognise the crucial points, you look there.

When I was small, I lived in a room under the roof. The window above my bed was set into the roof and thus was not vertical, but tilted at about 45°. To open it, you tilted it a bit more about a horizontal axis. It also had the glass pane set into a wooden frame, so that the frame worked like a small rim around the window. Now, under that roof we also had a wasp-nest, and every now and then, when the window was open a wasp would err into the room. Once inside it would see the big blue sky through the window, whereas the room was dark and shady. So in a futile attempt to get out again, the wasps bumped their head against the glass pane. Again and again, hours on end. In the end the wasps fell down into my bed, exhausted, and died there. Some of them checked all of the pane, until they reached the rim, but they couldn't see an exit there, either, so they went on along the rim or back inside the pane.

So all the wasps died, because they were too dumb to learn. They just repeated the same mistake over and over. It would have been so easy to escape and survive. All they had to do was understand that what they had done didn't work and back up a bit. Freedom was just a few inches away.

I have seen the same behaviour many times later on, but not with wasps, which can hold up to their defense that they are only small insects with even smaller brains, but with people, including myself. They try something, it doesn't work, they try it again. Then again. If something doesn't work, try doing it differently. Just repeating it over and over will get you nowhere. You have to change some parameters.

As an aside, there is the story of the two frogs in a bowl of milk, drowning, where one gives up and drowns, while the other struggles, trying again and again to jump out, until finally the milk changes to cream and he escapes. There also is an variation on this: "I'm so deep in sh*t, I can struggle all I want, it just won't turn to cream."

Also, if you want to eliminate a problem, first you have to find out what the problem really is in a complex system like a computer. If something won't work, there can be lots of reasons. Check out the different levels from low to high with elementary tests, to find out where things go wrong. This goes along with finding out what to learn.

*Meetings

Writing this nearly 20 years later in life, the challenges on my time have changed. Back then I was a single contributor, and had the freedom to of having most of my time to myself. I listed meetings and communications as a subitem of administrative. Now with a leadership role in a larger organisation, most of my time is eaten up by meetings, often meetings that I did not put on the agenda. 

In this situation, it becomes even more important to batch and compartmentalise time. As outlined in Maker's schedule, Manager's schedule by Paul Graham, it helps to block at least half-days for immersive work, thinking and learning, and to batch meetings. And I learned via Tim Ferris, "Your inbox is everybody else's agenda for your time." Control your own priorities and time, and do not let others dictate it to you.

My years with General Motors

By Alfred P. Sloan, Jr.

According to Bill Gates the single most useful book you can read on business. I agree it is great. This book states Sloan's business ideas in the unassuming voice of a personal memoir. Sloan must have been one of the best managers the world has ever seen. Read this book, and understand where all the stuff that Drucker wrote came from. Enough laurels, what does it say?

Sloan introduced organizational structures balancing central policy with decentralized execution (a lot of the most difficult issues he considers really come with size). He gave employees freedom to act guided by objectives and incentives. He was big on grasping reality, by collecting key operational data, by working out solutions by meetings of stakeholders. He looked ahead to preempt problems and see opportunities for innovation. And he did this on a level of success where it really becomes a bit scary.

Some concrete points:
Energy and logical action in accordance with facts and circumstances.

Purpose: The primary objective of the corporation is to make money, not just to make a product -- pay dividends and increase capital value. ROI is the unifying measure for each business unit.

Value: The future of the corporation depends on the ability to design and produce products of maximum utility in quantity at minimal cost. To succeed in business in the long run you must render service to the public.

Strategy: Companies compete in broad "policy" (i.e., strategy) as well as in products. Every enterprise needs a concept of its industry and the CEO must understand the industry. Think about what you are trying to do, in addition to the constraints imposed by customer demand, competition, technology, economic conditions and evolution. Establish principles and work from them.

Measurement: Measuring, organizing and presenting the significant facts about what is going on in and around a business is one of the chief bases for strategic business decisions. Finance can not exist in vacuum but has to be integrated with ops.

Consensus: Co-ordinate by committee. The executive committee is to pass policy in a clear cut way to supply the basis for authorized executive action, e.g. on quality standards, price schemes, market and competitive moves. It should have enough representatives from operations to come to realistic conclusions. The role of the executive is policy making. Have an operations committee of all unit heads. Gets all available data about performance, and includes executives. The goal: to bring about common understanding.

The Executive: There is a need need for authority of the chief. If possible have the boss be in charge of operations. A group can make policy, but only individuals can administer policy. If a company does not execute well, all policy is for naught.

Capital approbation for projects:
- what is the relative value of the project as compared to other projects in ROI and in necessity to support company operations as a whole
- does it work as a commercial venture?
- has it properly been developed technically?
- is it proper considering company interest as a whole (not just for the unit proposing)

Small projects can be authorized by the unit manager, large ones need a procedure and approval by top management/finance, and need to present their economic and technological benefit.

Organisational structure: Independent units coordinated by central management. There is need to separate divisional and corporate functions. The juncture between staff and line can be paralyzing if it turns into a battlefield. Have line representatives on staff committees to get buy-in and adequate representation of needs. Functions include development, engineering, production, sales, finance. There should be a separation between advanced product engineering and long term research.

Have representative members in parallel function from each unit get together to exchange and co-ordinate, give them authority and power so this coordination can be constructively applied. Confine the scope to problems/info exchange of common interest. Keep away from details, focus on basic problems. Keep sessions business like and to the point. Have a secretary to support the committee.

Personal productivity: Spend days with inspection and observation, nights with discussion. Only 5 direct reports to have time for large scale issues thinking. Put all your energy and experience into your work. Even at the cost of personal sacrifice.

Three Welch Ideas

1. Tell people the truth because they know the truth anyways. (About evaluating your employees. Does not mean you cannot do it in a friendly manner.)

2. If you are working 90 hours a week, make a list of the top 20 things that take your time. 10 of them can either be scrapped or delegated. (Works only if your have someone to delegate. Well at least you can scrap some.)

3. Bullet train. You can add ten mph by optimizing existing trains, but, if you want to double the speed, you need to go back to the drawing board and come up with a whole new idea.

The economic naturalist

By Robert H. Frank

This popular economics book, is written by the academic who wrote the Principles of Economics textbook which I dearly love.
This book contains short essays that try to answer from first economic principles puzzling questions like "Why are round trip airfares from Kansas City to Orlando lower than round trip airfares from Orlando to Kansas City?", or "Why is it easier to find a partner when you already have one?", or "Why are soda cans not shorter and wider, and thus cheaper by using less alloy for the same amount of liquid?"

The principles invoked are scarcity, opportunity cost, price discrimination, supply and demand, the tragedy of the commons, externalities. In many cases they fall short of giving a good explanation, and the answers resort to speculation about human psychology. Some answers are altogether unsatisfactory. Soda cans remain a mystery to me.

The Logic of Life

by Tim Harford

Another entertaining "popular economics" book. Although not quite as good as the undercover economist, is covers a wide range of everyday experiences and explains why the apparently unreasonable makes sense - for example: why your boss is overpaid, why real wages in the world's large metropolitan cities are lower (hint: not mainly because you can go out in the evening), why divorce rates are high and eligible bachelors scarce, why rich neighborhoods have better streets and infrastructure (hint: not because they are chummy with those in npower or bribe politicians), why race discrimination at work is hard to stamp out even if employers don't have any personal preferences.

Usually it comes down to rational decisions that each individual makes, which in aggregate lead to irrational outcomes or freeze in bad situations.

Managing for Results

by Peter Drucker

Full disclosure: I am a Drucker fan. This is an early work, written mostly for a mature business, with several products. Of course there is a lot more in the book than what I cover here. Go and read it. Some of the wisdom he has to dispense:

Results are obtained by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems. Resources, to produce results, must be allocated to opportunities, rather than to problems. Effectiveness rather than efficiency is essential in business.

He believes in the Pareto principle: most of the work is a waste, and 20% of it lead to 80% of the results.

Concentration is the key to economic results. Economic results require that staff efforts be concentrated on the few activities that are capable of producing significant business results. The crux of a program of action is the allocation of resources, and especially the staffing decisions.

No matter how well ordered a business, there is always a great deal more to be done then there are resources available to do it. The opportunities are always more plentiful than the means to realize them. There have to be priority decisions, or nothing will get done. Priority decisions bespeak the level of a management's vision and seriousness. They decide basic behavior and strategy. Nobody seems to have much difficulty in setting priorities. What people find difficult is to decide on "posteriorities"; that is, on what should not be done.

All proposals for new ventures, capital investment, or new products and services (...) should be presented together rather than piecemeal. (...) Only in this way is it possible to find out whether these proposals seek the best utilization of the company's resources. A proposal for any new venture must spell out what resources, especially what human resources, will be needed and where they are to come from. A proposal for a major new effort therefore should always spell out what old effort will be abandoned. Ask yourself: "If this product, activity or unit were not here today, would we start it?" If the answer is "No," then the question should be asked: "Should we continue, and why?"

I can tell you from working in a company where these tough decisions on priorities were never really taken: he is dead on. If you do not do it, you end up with all kinds of irrelevant, mismanaged, understaffed, hapless pet projects, and nothing of big impact seems to come out of it.

How to decide where to put your resources? Only the customer defines value. Quality is what he gets out of a product, not what the company puts in, or what is hard or technologically challenging to make -- that is just vanity and incompetence. You have to guess right what the customer wants, and put your efforts there.

So all you need is find out, what the customer will want, right? Which are the products you should focus on? Drucker comes up with categories similar to the ones later made popular by the Boston Consulting Group matrix of cash cow, star, dog, question mark: Some products make large revenue contributions, they are "today's breadwinners", but are mature without much hope for growth and they will eventually die off -- so maintain them, but with less effort than the revenue would indicate and average people. What you save you put into bets for new product development and for growing promising new products -- put money and your best people on it:

The one absolute rule in maximizing resources is that one never entrusts an opportunity to a non-resource, that is to mediocrity. It cannot turn that opportunity into advantage. But to every opportunity corresponds a risk; mediocrity is therefore bound to do harm if entrusted with opportunity. If a company is to obtain the needed contributions, it must reward those who make them. The spirit of a company is made, in the last analysis, by the people it chooses for senior positions.

Here again, focus on the critical few most promising endeavors:

The main rule for also-rans is that they must not absorb resources at the expense of high opportunity areas. What are we afraid of, what do we see as a threat to this business -- and how can we use it as an opportunity? What everybody in business "knows" can never happen should be examined carefully. Is "what can never happen" actually a major opportunity for the company to make something happen? Is it perhaps already happening? It is more profitable to take advantage of a new trend than it is to fight it.

After all, to quote Alan Kay, the best way to predict the future is to invent it. But be careful not to become so engrossed in new, exiting markets and research, that you forget to put enough resources on last years graduates that entered the market as vulnerable young products:

Typical areas of imbalance with disproportionately large productive resources incapable of producing adequate results within the existing business are marketing and research and development.

As soon as the new products get out there, into the rough wilderness that is the market, you will know if they fly. If you are lucky and one does, it may be still small but have potential to grow into "tomorrow's breadwinner". Put even more good people on it.

Other new products turn out to be outright failures, so obviously, do not put further effort into them and kill them off. That is the most effective way of cost-cutting.

We have the today's breadwinners, failures and tomorrow's breadwinners ... we're done, right?

Well, there is one more class, a dangerous, insidious one: "investments in managerial ego". These are failures that never took off, or old products that are dying, but management refuses to accept this truth. Crazy as it sounds, I have seen it happen. How can that be? How can management blatantly ignore the feedback they get from their customers?

Part of the the trap is that you regularly hear stories where persistence paid off and someone, against all odds, believed in his vision, and in the end vanquished all naysayers. Take iPod, after so many MP3 players that failed. So if things do not work at first, how do you know if you have such a "repair case" or a failure? My take is, for each iPod, you have dozens of failures. That's not the odds you want to take. Or if you want to take them, it should be as a start-up, which has to pay for its way, or die, instead of leeching of the sap of a healthy company. You may give it one try for fixing. After that, kill it off. In the words of W.C. Fields:

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it.

Part two of the trap is that managers have over-sized egos. To have the guts and go manage something, to make do-or-die decisions in the face of way too little information, you almost need an over-sized ego in the first place. So that does not make matters easier.

So there you have it: too often righteous managers believe that their concept is fundamentally sound and is destined to ultimate success, that customers just do not "get it" and need to be "educated", that sales people do not know how to sell it. Any evidence to the contrary just makes them dig in their heels deeper. I have heard people say "We must do now what the customer will need in five years, and doesn't understand himself yet". This may be true for some things, but it's a looong shot. Most of the time, you'll be better off just making what the customer needs now, or maybe in the coming year.

As an antidote to such behavior, Drucker recommends to write down the expectations for a project before it is undertaken, and then judge it on its performance against those. Curiosity is the name of the game, or maybe humility. In any case look out for unexpected behavior of customers. For when your expectations were wrong, there may be something going on, and you should find out, what. It may be the basis for a great business idea.

Fundamentals

You have to stand firm on the things that are important to you. You have to communicate them, so others can understand. You should be generous when it comes to unimportant stuff.

From Sascha I learned: you learn things by just tackling them. Don't begrudge the facts. Recognize problems and stuff that went wrong, think about how you can avoid what went wrong the next time, and think what you can do in the given situation.