Interesting thoughts. However for my business plan I have been looking at a bunch of other things and come to some other conclusions.
The first thing is, you can't build culture from the top-down and if you try hard enough you will look like Kim Jong Il. That there is a corporate culture is automatic though and it arises from the everyday way people interact in a business.
In the first days of a business, the founders tend to be very flexible, willing to take on eachothers' roles as needed to some degree. There aren't turf wars. Just everyone working together to make the company great.
Then you hire more people and a problem develops. People feel a need to quantify and control everything. And so management develops. What management really is there fore is to be a political filter which exists in between the employee and the executives and ensures that nobody takes proper risks.
My approach is going to be somewhat different. First we are going with a relatively flat model inspired by WL Gore, Valve and Github, and where we have to add management and escalation, we make these as non-management-like as possible.
Our key values are likely to be openness, collaboration, collegiality, and entrepreneurship.
We will hire quality employees and get out of their way.
Executives will work side-by-side with employees on projects deemed to be of critical importance. Leadership --- and followership --- will be distributed throughout the organization.
This all sounds great until one comes back to the culture issue. Is it even possible to manage corporate culture as one climbs the logistic sigmoid? Or does maturity bring habits? In other words, is it true you can't teach an old dog new tricks?
People feel a need to quantify and control everything
People don't feel this at all, inherently. Organizations say, we will evaluate you by these criteria, and upon that evaluation will depend your promotion/bonus/opportunity to work on projects of your choosing/whatever.
As soon as you do that, people make damn sure that what they do is counted, and that is a perfectly rational response. And unless everyone knows everyone (and their work) personally and in detail, there's no other way to structure or scale an organization that wants to attract ambitious people.
I think most people do reflexively seek to control whenever they aren't feeling secure about everything. When you primarily see risks, you want to make sure you don't go there. The harder thing is to make sure you know where you are going, instead of where you aren't. And there management gets in the way.
I am not saying that quantification isn't important. It is even necessary. What I am saying is I am not so sure that top-down structures don't get in the way more than they help.
I can think of one problem with that. Not everyone likes to work on projects with their boss.
It can lead to important team members becoming subservient and afraid of speaking up. It can make other members change what they say to try and win points. And it can engender a culture of distrust.
I would assume that at first, when you have 5 employees, everyone is working, hands-on, together. When you have 50 employees, many may be doing things that are regulated by other dynamics in the company and where the executive mostly just makes sure he/she's available to advise, mentor, and more rarely take action.
But you are likely to still have those new and exciting initiatives, where a small group of people needs to work together to make it happen. So you might have an executive and four employees working together, hands-on in this.
But you are right to worry about employees being afraid to speak up. This is why it is important to have a culture of openness, collaboration, and collegiality, and where leadership and followership are distributed.
One other caveat: because of the market we are in we are likely to be hiring older developers with at least some self-employment experience. At some point if we start hiring younger folks I would expect the transition will be a slower one with a lot more mentoring. I would worry a lot less about all this with older developers who have been their own bosses and are clearly told we want them to continue to be their own bosses to the extent possible than I would folks without that experience.
The first thing is, you can't build culture from the top-down and if you try hard enough you will look like Kim Jong Il. That there is a corporate culture is automatic though and it arises from the everyday way people interact in a business.
In the first days of a business, the founders tend to be very flexible, willing to take on eachothers' roles as needed to some degree. There aren't turf wars. Just everyone working together to make the company great.
Then you hire more people and a problem develops. People feel a need to quantify and control everything. And so management develops. What management really is there fore is to be a political filter which exists in between the employee and the executives and ensures that nobody takes proper risks.
My approach is going to be somewhat different. First we are going with a relatively flat model inspired by WL Gore, Valve and Github, and where we have to add management and escalation, we make these as non-management-like as possible.
Our key values are likely to be openness, collaboration, collegiality, and entrepreneurship.
We will hire quality employees and get out of their way.
Executives will work side-by-side with employees on projects deemed to be of critical importance. Leadership --- and followership --- will be distributed throughout the organization.
This all sounds great until one comes back to the culture issue. Is it even possible to manage corporate culture as one climbs the logistic sigmoid? Or does maturity bring habits? In other words, is it true you can't teach an old dog new tricks?