You weren't meant to have a boss

Very interesting article. Just last year I left a big (for New Zealand) insurance co to work in a small start up internet co. I have no security, a small salary but a much more fulfilling job.

A very successful "free intraprise" system that creates very free small groups is underway in the Forest Service. The focus is not on external products and services, but on doing the work that is needed by the line officers. Biological surveys, Oracle database management, trail building, planning, etc. "Enterprise teams compete for these jobs. Line officers with budgets can hire outside contractors, one of several competing enterprise teams in that business, full time employees, etc. The enterprise teams have most of the freedoms of a start-up. They have internal "bank accounts" that they can carry earnings over from year to year. This provides security which allows risk taking. They chose their own products and services and set their own prices. They choose who to hire and have limited ability to fire (from the team, not the Forest Service) team members who do not work out. This is an area of weakness, but not enough to crater the system.

The result is very good. The intrapreneurs (people who behave like entrepreneurs inside a larger organization) are 1.8 times as productive as the average government employee and far happier. They tend to keep working after becoming eligible for retirement. Most say they would never go back to the old bureaucratic way.

There don't seem to be any fist fights. One team got too big and is breaking up into smaller enterprises.

The system was designed based on the book "The End of Bureaucracy and he Rise of the Intelligent Organization" by Gifford and Elizabeth Pinchot. Note: I am Gifford) It has also been applied successfully in a large semiconductor firm.

The largest organizations (nations or the entire planet) bring about order using self organizing systems. They do so because, for all the reasons in the article, the chain of command has limited ability to use the intelligence of all the members of a large system. While decision making is concentrated, intelligence is widely distributed, approximately one brain per human.

Very large commercial organizations are possible, but they must use self organizing systems, which involve freedom of the parts, as a major element of organizational design. After all, nations gave up on hierarchy as the method of organizing their economies with the fall of the Soviet Union. Even though it is large, the United States allows entrepreneurs considerable freedom. Large companies can too.

Re: Size of enterprises see: The Dunbar Number at Life with Alacrity:

http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2004/03/the_dunbar_numb.html

Paul,

Good essay. I apologize for seeming nitpicky, but worry you may be encouraging misunderstanding about the type of person who succeeds at sales inside a large company:

The restrictiveness of big company jobs is particularly hard on programmers, because the essence of programming is to build new things. Sales people make much the same pitches every day; support people answer much the same questions; but once you've written a piece of code you don't need to write it again.

Sales people actually do build things. The things they build are called client relationships. Each one is new and different in some way. Once the relationship is created, upselling is pretty easy to do, as are yearly renewals. Often, these renewals are sent over to the account management team and taken out of the hands of sales.

There's actually quite a bit of strategy involved in creating these relationships, especially for a complex sale -- complex in terms of the organizational structure of the customer and the technology of the product. There's an awful lot of time spent thinking about what questions to ask different people in the organization and when in order to find their specific problems and elicit the specific needs. Only after you know what you need to know about the organization and the people in it do you pitch. A lot of these problems and needs are similar, but the pitch has to be tailored to what they have told you. This is how you show the customer respect, and build trust. A lot of it is subconscious but a lot of it is learned behavior.

Furthermore, sales at a large company can be quite entrepreneurial. You either make your numbers or you don't. If you don't, you get fired. If you exceed them by a large enough margin, you get to skip sales meetings and show up whenever you feel like it.

This is the first time I've commented on one of your essays, but I've bought about 5 copies of your collection for friends.

Well, in one sense, it's much easier having no debt. Imagine trying to found a company if you owned a house with no mortgage, had a vegetable garden out back, and owed nobody anything.

Realistically, what are your living expenses... how much money do you really need to buy 3- 6- or even 48-months of your time?

Now imagine that you own no property of any sort, and have large loan payments that you have to make every month. How much money do you really need to buy even 3- or 6- months of your time.

The opportunity cost of starting the startup is roughly the same (adjustments for interest between the riskfree rate and your credit rating notwithstanding), but the actual number of dollars that have to come from somewhere is quite different indeed.