[hogehoge51]

The point is the wolf does not need managment. He has built up a model in his head of the problem and solution space better that a team of 1x specialists. T expose it to "managment" , "oversight" and "accountability" is to destroy it, especially for the article that shows an innnovative solution to an organizational pain point. They may be poorly managed, but they may be well managed, either way the managment style likey does not match the particular problem and/or solution the wolf is adressing. One of the key premises of The Innnovators Dillema is that well managed companies are well managed in sweet spots of operation and struggle outside of that sweet spot.

Now, the wolf may benefit from hands off managment, but they will need leadership support. The author seems to have proposed a style of leadership centered around hands off managment and letting the wolf sink or swim. I would hope thismstyle of leadershio includes him holding a life support by the sidelines. (leadership != management)

[steveBK123]

> One of the key premises of The Innnovators Dillema is that well managed companies are well managed in sweet spots of operation and struggle outside of that sweet spot.

This become apparently quickly to anyone thats worked in a rapidly scaling company, switched from megacorp to startup, or vice versa.

There are processes and controls that make a lot of sense when you have 100k employees that will literally strangle your company to death when you have only 20 employees. What process & controls you add over time, as you grow from 20->200->2000->20k is another question.

If you hire too many megacorp thinkers into your smallcorp too early, you will observe this friction. Likewise if you do grow to 2000 people and still have Bob the Wolf ordering servers on his personal Amex, you're probably gonna have some problems.

[maccard]

I’ve only done 20-200-2k, but I agree with you fully. At 2k, there’s a weird middle ground (IMO) where you actually need a handful of wolves to keep things nimble. They cause an awful lot of strife particularly to the people who are trying to grow from 2k -20k, but they are the thing that keeps the other people moving in the right direction until you’re big enough that it’s just not tolerable anymore.

At that point you get an office of the CTO to be formal wolves!

[hogehoge51]

you need flexible organziational glue logic at this scale, and the so called wolve can help, so this office of wolves can be the ones patch wires and to reprogram the organzational FPGA's or rewrite the organizational routing table (or what ever it is distributed software people use as glue logic...)

[hogehoge51]

> This become apparently quickly to anyone thats worked in a rapidly scaling company, switched from megacorp to startup, or vice versa.

exactly! my frame of reference...

[roenxi]

> The point is the wolf does not need managment.

If some dev rolls up to work and claimed that "I don't need to do anything to be a high value programmer" because he has mastered the zen of not getting in the way of good code, is anyone going to buy that? It is a lie for those who were born yesterday by someone justifying not being very good at their job. Ditto when a manager says it, even if they are important enough nobody is going to call them out directly. Under no circumstances is what the narrator describes a good response. All managers have limitations so sure maybe it is the best response he can muster and he's still a great manager otherwise, fair enough, but the story then isn't that wolves are amazing, but that the writer has a massive blind spot, it hasn't caused a big enough problem that they had to fix it and they've settled on tonic immobility as a strategy because they haven't figured out the productive action.

The situation is an employee is doing great things. Employees manager-once-removed agrees. The middle manager is trying to stop the employee. That isn't a story where the key is an amazing employee. It is a story where manager-once-removed doesn't know how to manage the middle manager, and the middle manager is either being undermined, is incompetent or both.

That is reading a lot into 2 blog posts, so I wouldn't go down on that ship. Maybe there are a lot of extenuating circumstances that aren't being written down. But the most likely fit of the facts in a software business is that management are flailing. Which is cool, management sometimes flails. But the focus should be on improving managers so they can do their job properly, not pushing the stress of dealing with their flailing down to the employees. It is unfair and stressful for the lower tiers of the org tree, and flailing management can get a lot of people fired.

[hogehoge51]

Interesting. I read the article and situation completely differently.

I suspect the author has failed to explain enough to get readers outside of their preconceptions based on their experience.

In particular I think management and leadership have been conflated in most interpretations - his inaction is a form of leadership to promote personal growth for line manager and IC. The absence of management is the application of this leadership.

(But who really knows...)