31–40 of 497 posts
But how would this really work? Someone wants to create a new drug, but it’ll cost millions of euros and years of trials to bring to the market. Who approves and commits?
It's going to hit the layers of management those people report to.
I've been through it. It has it's benefits (fewer decision makers) but also drawbacks (decision makers tend not to have the full picture).
The WSJ article mentions that the CEO mapped out his plan at a cafe with a McKinsey consultant. No matter how badly this goes, sounds like McKinsey will make out again…
What under if McKinsey will start pushing this at other orgs?
At least that's how it was sold to my employer when they had the same change not long ago.
"This is what Google does and they are innovative. Don't you want to be innovative like Google?"
Checks all the boxes a CEO wants to hear.
I’ve seen this first hand. One place where I worked HR even had a table of team size vs manager compensation. When I pointed out that it may not be the best idea to directly incentivize managers to hire more people they were less than understanding. Of course it went totally out of control.
But sadly there just is no counteracting force (except perhaps mr Musk). When you apply for your next job as a manager they will ask you “How big was your team?”, and they won’t be impressed when you say “I managed to keep it down to four people”. It’s just something that resonates very strongly with the primitive side of our brains (“You say you were the chief, how big was your tribe?”).
I've been in one self-organizing department, and it was one of the worst experiences of my career. I expect they're going to regret this.
A self organizing department within a sea of non-self organizing departments sounds terrible. Thankfully this is being implemented company wide.
[that will probably not last long, anyway]
I've been in one self-organizing department, and it was one of the worst experiences of my career. I expect they're going to regret this.
It works pretty well when there is a clear task and alignment on why it needs to get done. Unfortunately you still need someone to set expectations and resolve conflicts.
Holocracy has never worked. Someone has to do the management tasks, even if you pretend there aren’t any managers.
I've seen a similar idea implemented with a lot of tech teams. In particular, I've seen companies try to be "flat," meaning that the software developers don't have managers, but instead, the software developers are expected to self-organize. But all of the normal tasks of a manager still exist: someone has to coordinate the work of multiple teams when those teams have zones of concern that overlap, and someone needs…
I suspect you didn't actually report into this Project Manager in the org chart, did you? Did she make hiring/firing decisions for the engineering team? Was she in charge of budgeting for the engineering team, including raises and bonuses? Did she approve vacation requests?
Just because she was attached to the engineering team and had Manager in her job title doesn't mean she was the manager of the team. To me, "Project Manager" is a separate role that is not actually higher than an IC engineer in the org chart
I wouldn't expect to make more money than the person I report into, especially because that person generally has authority over me and could probably terminate my job entirely if they wanted to
It's "holacracy" all over again! How soon they forget.
Were those ideas debunked or something?