Hugh MacLeod
Cartoons drawn on the back of business cards
May 1, 2005
I have a question:
1. Assume you work for a very large company. Thousands of employees.
2. Assume your company has no hierachies. None. Zilch. Nada.
3. How different would your company’s main software have to be, compared to typical software used by most large companies these days?
Just curious.
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Are the first and second assumptions not excluding each other? A small company does not need a hierarchy. It could do without because using direct communication between partners would be a huge advantage.
A big company however could not use direct communication. The human mind is not suited to communicate two-way with thousands of other people. This is the reason for the existence of hierarchies.
Maybe a federation of small companies could work, but even then you will need some levels of hierarchy.
Gideon, IT after all stands for “information etc.” — why not make IT that works truly as a information exchange tool, or information streamlining, or information infrastructure to make the communication happen in a huge corporation as well as it does in a small one? If so, it could replace the need for a hierarchy would it not?
But I gather that you do agree with Hugh, current system does not work, or rather would not help in a hiearachical-free large organisation. Or what?
Newspapers. Hmm.
A crazy advertising system that let sales executives ally themselves with clients to try and outbid eachother for space on the page.
How would editorial control work without editors? Voting for the most interesting stories? Software that took care of all of the layout for you, so all you had to do was input the text and decide communally what was most fascinating.
Would be pretty cool.
very different: it’d be open, current, collaborative, trusted and communicative to begin w/…
but, we aren’t talking about reality now are we…
not every employee would have the same motivations or even consider themselves a peer to the other 1000(s) of employees, due to differences in personal ethics and perception…
not reality — but a cool alternate reality to consider…
companies that are using tools like: blogs, wikis, podcasting, p2p and videoblogging will be moving more rapidly away from the legacy biz structure and technological condition you allude to quicker than those who do not though…
so it’s a start…
My point is this: whatever technology or culture, in the end, it will be biology that becomes the limiting factor. People can not communicate effectively with more then a handful of people, no tool or culture will resolve this.
History shows that any organisation, given enough time, will become an aristocracy. This is because all tools which assist with organizing have the inherent secondary effect of promoting centralisation and concentration of power.
Do we need need organisations? If yes, which kind and with which purpose? Maybe we need less organisation and more individual action? Maybe we should see organisations as recyclable tools: Created for a clearly defined project and disbanded as soon as the project is ended.
USA only as far as I know but I’m sure other countries have adopted similar rules: Today the structure of the company has little to do with the software it runs on. Most software and and process today is to prove you are not total asshats trying to live large at the expense of employess and share holders. See Sarbanes Oxley rules (http://www.aicpa.org/info/sarbanes_oxley_summary.htm). In the long run companies will spend more mone on Sarbanes Oxley compliance than they spend on throwing out all the old non Y2K compliant code.
My view is that IT utilization is caught in myriad local sub-optima. Every part of the whole sees benefit to itself decrease in every direction it looks. Yet, as a whole there are absolutely directions in which there are positive gains to be had.
Absolutely a cultural issue.
Ricardo Semler and Semco?
Search for the name on your favorite online bookseller. The Seven-Day Weekend was my first exposure. Largely ignored and apparently not well known.
Question:
How different would your company’s main software have to be, compared to typical software used by most large companies these days?
(My) Answer:
Performance reporting. It puzzles me why the reports that get generated to gauge the performance of the entire organisation, departments/divisions and individuals are (usually) well hidden, where only appointed managers can access this info. I think most employees would gain something from seeing how their efforts are going. I think the organisations they work for would in turn gain something from that.
folders, filing cabinets, bookshelves, hierarchies
This provocative question by Hugh hit one snag — most commenters feels that large organisations cannot exist without hierarchies. As expressed by Katherine:
I’d use messaging software like REBOL to make that work, but that’s possibly because I just really like REBOL.
See http://www.altme.com/what.html for an example of how such software might work.
Life in the big city…
Like Doug said, The Seven Day Weekend. If you’ve not read this book, please read it. It’s simply superb.
In the book, Ricardo Semler cites an example of a big company which has a sourcing policy in place for buying computers and software where the test the software and hardware (to death) and end up buying the stuff much later (I think it’s either six months or a year) than when it hits the market.
Semco on the other hand has different vendors and clients who walk in to their offices wonder at how they manage to get the latest stuff. It’s because they don’t have a policy on buying; they pretty much don’t have policies on anything. (Their company policy guide or whatever is a bunch of cartoons.)
The catch with a place like Semco though is that you have to be responsible for what you do and not push it off as somebody else’s decision, so you’d better make an informed choice. In a way, this is like a small company, where there’s no separate IT department to handle other departments’ requests, so you end up being the one to make a choice.
With software though, there’s also this whole “my friends in so-and-so big name company are using it, we should too.” But, that’s a discussion for another day.
A lack of hierarchies does not negate individuality. The most natural thing about us is that we all have unique interests and abilities and within any organisation assume roles that (hopefully) best suit us. I think that current software largely supports this, the hierarchical nature only comes in the way the software is used.
An editor need not be in control of the content, but assume the role of making sure the content is in line with eg: the community’s purpose. The conversation (or the workflow) can still be on a single level.
the thing about circumventing or subverting the tendency toward hierachy is, many people, if not most, are slavishly authoritarian. without someone telling them what to do, they freak out and stop producing anything. only the brave can handle non-hierarchical structure.
case in point, we’ve tried to do things horizontally in my organization, but critical tasks fell through simply because no one waved their scepter and intoned “MAKE IT SO!” and so the ideas were all thrown out there but never acted on. then it became a circular firing squad of blame.
when eliminating hierarchies, how do you prevent harmful chaos that arises out of slavishness, cowardice and conformity? you can’t just fire everybody or quit and vow to only work with brave individualists forevermore. if you work with other people, some of them are going to be cowards and liars. you need some way to negotiate with these people, but it’s hard to imagine how without a guillotine standing in the corner. what’s the answer to that conundrum?
p.s. — the technology/software part of my question/statement, i guess, is: if you have a collaborative software environment, as we do, this problem still exists, even with working document checkout, collaborative timelines, messaging, etc. etc. — you still somehow need somebody who is willing to take an executive role.…don’t you?
Campester, what about a structured flow (does away with the scepter wielding fellah) and transparency with peer pressure to follow?
Half the job or a hierarchy is to offer process structure, half data (people) structure. Data structure is easy to replace, but process structure has to be properly replaced, otherwise you’ll get issues like you describe. That’s the tricky part…
“How different would your company’s main software have to be”? Very.As in previous conversations here, it seems to most of us that existing enterprise software is ‘concrete’, and solidifies existing business hierarchies. This is evidenced by the way access to functions and information is controlled based on a position in the hierarchy (I’ve just spent all day in a meeting discussing this very thing!). Sig’s idea of a ‘flow’ is a step in the right direction, but it does require some commonality of purpose for people to overcome the vertical hierarchy to achieve the horizontal process. That commonality is most often “achieved” by edict and conformity to the command and control setup, but the effort involved in crossing the functional boundaries tends to wreck the intention.
This appears to be one of those hypothetical situations that are fun to ponder, but extremely difficult to realize.
A lot of the examples given tend to generalize social interaction as the same as business interaction. While similar, they are not the same. They have different motivations. They have different objectives. They have different valuation systems. It is not possible to substitute one for the other. The interaction of the parts produces different results. So while the study of social interaction may further the study of business interaction, it is not a mirror.
To continue with my ‘devils advocate’ position, if we are to consider the ‘macro’, consider the ‘micro’ too.
1. You are the owner of a company.
2. You choose the hierachy of your company.
3. How would it be different than what you already know?
I think too often software tries to be the-next-big-thing, when it should really be the-reinvention-of-an-existing-thing.
In my mind, wikis are the modern notepad or meeting minutes, online communities are the modern club or civic group. They supplant existing behavior. I know I am generalizing and minimalizing, but they are not ‘new’. They are variations on the existing.
Man has existed much longer than the Internet. Our social patterns are well defined not from a lack of technology, but inspite of technology. One might do better to ask ‘how can we improve our current interaction?’, instead of ‘how can we create a new form of interaction?’
Assumption #2 is a non-real-world conception.
Including it trivializes any answer.
Large groups are always made up of smaller groups. This was also bourne out by the Shirky papers that Hugh referred to.
If assumption #1 is true and we eliminate #2 as unachievable, question #3 still needs to be answered.
My guess is that the main software should have a social component if the company is to survive the next few years.
I third the recommendation of “The Seven Day Weekend” and also recommend “Maverick” another book by ricardo Semler.
There are some really interesting experiments going on in Brazil with regards to reshaping capitalism.
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