| Thanks for pointing me to the blog. I wish he wrote fewer words while making the same points. I am guilty of the same thing. Here is where I arrived to so far on this subject from my own reading, thinking and experience: Each person changes over time - they want varying degrees of responsibility, working on new things, improving existing skills, who they want to work with etc. People age and with that their personal situations change as well. Change is inevitable. A company, group of people executing a process which provides value and receives more money than they spend to provide that value, can only survive if it can adapt to change. Both the change coming from individuals in the company and external change coming from the market. There seem to be almost no companies ( maybe Valve, Semco and few others but I never worked in any of those ) which try to adapt to both the internal changes of their people and external changes of the market. The current situation is this: The rigid hierarchical companies with what Michael Church calls "Closed allocation" fail to adapt to both internal and external changes and then they eventually die. What the guy on the ribonfarm blog called - the clueless take over and the losers and sociopaths just jump ship - then the company dies. In the startup phase, the people make the company change until market fit is achieved. After market fit is achieved, it causes the company to resist any personal internal change so that the achieved market fit can be optimized. If there is no external change in the market the company thrives and can simply replace any "failed" individuals who no longer fit with external ones which will fit. The company puts in place new individuals to fill the rigid self perpetuating hierarchy which can still provide the same value from the market fit. The company does not care if a great female employee had a child and needs to work 4 hours a day - she is underperforming and needs to be fired for the good of the company. Bigger offices need to be leased and a small group of people who now live far away can just quit and be replaced etc.
Many of the people are not happy but need to pretend they are still the right fit - they just punch in and out - "this is just a job" now. In case the market fit does not last long but the company has made internal changes impossible - the company will die. If there is still possibility of internal change the company might adapt - but very unlikely if this happens after market fit was once achieved. Here is my current solution to this. Recognize that change is inevitable. Embrace it. Create a system which can adapt faster than the change that can cause either personal unhappiness or loss of market fit or profit if you will. The only way to achieve this is to let people inside the company make their own decisions for as much as they are comfortable with. One way is democracy. People vote and tyranny of majority rules. If you do not show up to vote, whatever is voted gets selected. Every decision is put to a vote or voted to be delegated to people with a finite time limit. The limit passes and a vote needs to happen again. You can even vote for a monarchy in case of crisis - have someone make all the decisions for a period of time. The crucial thing is that any vote has a time limit and another vote is forced - to adapt to change. Democracy depends on informed participants. No internal company information can be hidden. Salaries are an example of something that needs to be open. Salaries get chosen and budgets get voted for. You select your salary but everyone gets to vote on the budget that salary is in. Every part of the company should have a time limit - die - and be assembled again. No group should live for more than some time limit without have a vote on who is part of it, what the budget is, what the focus is. Is this done every month, every quarter, every 6 months or a year depends on the situation. But companies need to reinvent themselves. The time limit on votes forces the answer to "WHY". Is this group needed, did we select the right leader, right people, do we need more, do we need to change the market, product, the janitor ... |