I am about to start a new book called Think Big, Act Small by Jason Jennings. I am hoping this book will affirm a long-held belief of mine that big companies should adopt elements of the startup business culture to add a sense of urgency and accountability to every day tasks.
Since that’s a mouth-full, allow me to elaborate.
In my experience at big companies, I have found that they like to partition off competence areas into separate groups. As a part of a competence group, members often co-locate, train together, meet together, and report to someone within their area. When needed, they are mixed into a project team, but its a loose coupling. In most cases, accountability seems to be stronger within their competence group and weaker within the project team. In my opinion, the accountability is misdirected, thus leaving the possibility for project concerns to go unfulfilled. And they often do.
I’m quite sure that I haven’t made the problem quite clear, but in the interest of keeping this short, I’m going to move to my solution.
At a startup, you take a collection of people with various competencies, give them a mission, and then they make it happen. Each person is accountable to their role, but contributes to the overall mission. In short, they work as a hungry startup whose mission is to seed and grow the business. And so basically, you cannot succeed individually when the business itself is failing. You wear all hats necessary and are accountable for more than your own competency.
So the question is: how can you achieve this within the context of a big company?
To be honest, I’m not sure. My dream scenario is to have a company be logically divided into a series of small companies from an organizational perspective. Each small company has their own CEO, CTO, COO, etc. Each has their set of metrics and each employee is accountable for all metrics, but some more than others. When you as an employee are allocated to a company, you have full skin in the game. Management of a small company has mostly-free reign to make things happen as they need to. They must business plan, execute, hire, fire, etc.
Employees start in a competence group, but are hired out of their group and allocated to a small company. When this happens, all reporting ties are broken with their competence groups. They now become accountable to their business. Employees that are fired or retired must seek out their next position. To stay on the bench and not be utilized would make them vulnerable to downsizing.
I rushed through the explanation, but to me this makes a lot of sense. In most matrix-based organizations accountability has mostly been lost. People please their competency group, but disappoint their projects. They make their competency group goals, but fail the project goals. And continued employment and bonuses are often based upon their standing in the competency group as opposed to their ability to bring their competency to bear within the context of a project.
As I’ve read this back over, it appears that I’ve all but duplicated the organization structure of a consulting firm and their engagements. But I think its much different duplicating this organization structure in a big company.
If anyone has similar thoughts or related experiences, feel free to weigh in.