[einhverfr]

I am not denying that corporate culture takes on a life of its own, and that the system's rationality and the participants are not closely linked.

What I am asking is whether great places to work inevitable decay as the company gets large, and if that is the case, what is the point of a startup? Why not seek to make an idea that scales down rather than scales up? Is it all about personal wealth? But for those of us who want to build great businesses, in every sense of the word 'great,' how do we get around this problem?

I have my own ideas but they are largely untested.....

[lrobb]

What I am asking is whether great places to work inevitable decay as the company gets large

Odds are you will definitely lose that personal connection as you go from working for "the owner" to working for a manager that reports to a VP that reports to the CEO that reports to the Board that reports to the shareholders.

But what I've seen in a lot of these "leaving" posts isn't quite that... It's more of a "the king has no clothes" epiphany: They go to work at a place thinking it's a thing-in-itself then wake up one day and realize how the sausage is being made.

So GOOG isn't a post-grad research lab: It's a company that sells ads. So GS isn't the equivalent of a fee only financial planner.

They never were more than that.. only the people involved thought they were something more.

[einhverfr]

What lessons can be learned from managing an open source community that can be applied to a formal corporation?

[lrobb]

I served as a VP & President for a small non-profit club.

Two takeaways:

1) You don't really have any power. You need to lead by example and empower other people rather than command. 2) The personality required to establish a project is often different than the personalities required to keep it going.

[einhverfr]

But on top of that, I wonder how much management could be eliminated. Management is, in most businesses, fundamentally a communication infrastructure. How much of it can be replaced through implementing IT through was that work for FOSS projects?

My thinking is to have a relatively small group of high level managers, a group of project managers, and an HR department, and eliminate all middle management. I think teams should have rotating leadership but coordination should take place in ways which include both the upper management and folks on the floor directly using things like email lists.

Maybe this is a pipe dream. But maybe it can be made to work.....

[Drbble]

Rotating/randomize leadership is called "sortition" and it has been known since Roman Empire times as a solution to the corruption and inefficiency problems of hierarchy and representative democracy. It also solves the problem of bizarre distortion when you need to choose a winner among 100 qualified candidates -- better to pick one well rounded winner at random than to choose purely based on metrics that promote "teaching to the test".

[nostrademons]

At least at Google, middle management doesn't exist to run projects. They exist to provide career guidance, ensure people are happy, and keep them from leaving for Facebook.

This is a task that doesn't scale, because it requires knowing your reports well enough, as a person, that you understand their career goals, their likes & dislikes, their strengths & weaknesses, etc. so you can steer them into the right role. It's the tech lead's job to manage the (engineering half of) the project, and the tech lead frequently doesn't manage any of the people involved. I've found that managers can rarely manage more than 20 people effectively, and usually drop off sharply in effectiveness after 8-10 people.

Open source projects don't face this limitation, because your way of ensuring that everyone's happy is to assume that everyone who's not happy has quit. I suppose some big companies do this too - Yahoo seems to be trying out this strategy right now - but it really doesn't go over well with the public at large, and it wastes a lot of effort spent investing in new employees.

[ticks]

Presumably it has something to do with external stakeholders. The more influence they get, the more they can drive the company towards short-termism and potential destruction. You either need an incisive leader, or a bootstrapped business.

[kds]

On philosophical theoretic grounds:

I believe that such "decay" processes are inevitable in the long run, following organizational growth as time goes by. Maybe in the advanced management theory someone has yet to formulate the laws/principles of corporate thermodynamics. (This is not my original thought, I've read it somewhere but can't remember the source).

On a more practical grounds, a few seeming counter examples:

- Virgin Group is a highly decentralized conglomerate of 300+ businesses all over the world and each of them is mostly autonomous (Though when you think of Virgin Group there is only one personality springing in mind - that of Richard Branson)

- Well, Apple, of course.. Though some say Apple of the 2000's after Steve Job's return is a different company entirely (in most of the aspects but those concerning mainly legal formalities around the corporate entity, its registration details, and logo design principles).

P.S.

So the point of a startup to a business is that of a birth and early childhood to a human.

Businesses (as functional organizations) and humans (as living beings) have ultimately the same fate in the end, though the time-scales differ.

[justincormack]

Virgin has always described itself as a branded VC company, not a large business.