Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Bartweiss 2976 days ago
> The bigger the organization, the more muddy the waters. Cryptic territorial fights, all up and down the chain, become a shade coloring a great many decisions.

I heard a story recently of a fairly simple decision that put two territorial groups in conflict. It escalated to the person at the split between branches, who made the decision.

Which is fine, except that the arguing parties didn't overlap one or two levels up. A question of "who wins over this one task at one site" landed on the desk of a senior VP overseeing dozens of sites after wasting the time of a half dozen managers who escalated it and fought with each other. At a conservative guess, it cost $2,000 in salary just to decide who would do the task.

I think people undervalue how much benefit startups get just from having fewer disagreements that Need An Adult. Passing decisions down from the top is fine, but pushing conflicts up and back down is ridiculously expensive in time, money, and goodwill.
1 comments
lostcolony 2976 days ago
And the best part was the person making the decision was completely non-technical, and unaware of the actual considerations. Their decision was likely based on as much valid insight as a coin flip. Had a coin flip been agreed upon earlier, not only would the results likely have been the same, but morale would have been better, and costs would have been lowered.

Not necessarily advocating for a coin flip approach, just, you know your company is unhealthy when decisions can be made equally well if not better via random chance as by allowing your process to handle them.

link
Bartweiss 2976 days ago
Hah, this was actually my thought when I first heard it.

Anywhere in that entire chain, two equal-power managers could have said "this really isn't a big deal, I'll flip you for it". It would have saved time and money, and probably produced less resentment than the 'intelligent' decision.

We already know the average stock picker is at 'random chance' levels of quality - I wonder how many other parts of corporate life could be replaced with a dartboard?

link