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October 28, 2005
Meeting the Needs of the Company
Francis Porretto, like most people who actually have to do something to be successful at work, hates meetings. Until my job recently became largely a matter of attending meetings to prepare other people for the meetings they would soon be having for yet a third set of people, I would have joined him utterly in his rant. Now all I can think about is how much I'd love to cut down to 25 hours of meetings a week (one alone runs 4 hours, and usually runs over); yet on the other hand I have essentially no deliverables, so I'm getting paid for this, rather than having to do it at the expense of what I am getting paid for, which is the more normal situation. Interestingly, though, Fran brings up something that strikes a false note:
Companies tend to absorb the character of their most important customers, and a defense contractor has but one.
Certainly, the Pentagon side of the military is bureaucratic, officious, meeting-prone, inefficient and almost irrelevant in the short term — unless they badly bungle their jobs, such as forgetting to order enough MREs for next year or something like that. But the real model might be the other part of the military, the fighting part.
A friend and I have been discussing this idea for years, and it begun with two simple ideas: that any problem that persists in an organization for more than a few days is a management problem; and that if one is not efficient in some way, one should work on that problem from a management angle, rather than from a process or oversight angle. From this has flowed many, many ideas about corporate organization, and in the end the model we've come up with, for an organization that produces something other than reports, is very close to the military fighting leadership model. (For producing meaningless reports, the current normal business structure can likely not be improved upon.)
The key factors in this are personal responsibility at all tasks, and sidelining the waste in the organization. Waste, in general, is highest in those parts of the organization that do not directly create something. Finance, legal and HR come immediately to mind as great sources of waste. The corollary to this is that those departments should be small, and should be purely advisory, with no decision-making capacity of their own, except for their responsibilities over their own people. Instead, the central organizations of finance, legal and HR should exist to create and promulgate policy, and to train the people in each department who will act as liaisons to the actual managers in that capacity. The managers, in contrast, should have absolute control over what their group does: if they want to break a legal or financial rule, they may do so without regard to what the lawyers or accountants think. However, they will have to be accountable for that, to their managers, should their overriding of such a rule lead to troubles for the organization, or to failure to deliver.
In other words, past a certain level, all managers would have a staff of specialists for support services, and no one but the manager would be responsible for everything done underneath him. That leads to some interesting changes that would have to be made otherwise, as well. For example, groups would have to be attached from supporting organizations to business organizations. Take an auto manufacturer and their IT support. Putting an IT person on each team in the plant would be inefficient due to the small support load of each. Putting only a single person as staff advisor would be insufficient because there would likely be several plant-specific servers, as well as the connections to other plants and to regional and corporate offices. So there would probably be a small staff of IT people at the plant, detached (in organizational terms) from the corporate IT department, but entirely reporting to the plant manager. They would be responsible for both the in-house servers and the connections to other IT resources outside the plant, and the plant manager, not the corporate IT manager who has a hundred plants begging for priority, would be responsible for solving the IT problems of his plant, even if that means bypassing or ignoring corporate IT standards, restrictions and constraints.
There is more to this, but I think that conveys the flavor. It would be interesting to see how this would work in a real organization.
UPDATE: I suppose I should spell out one important part of this; the one, in fact, that led me to write the post. The purpose of meetings is to coordinate different groups that do not report to the same management chain, or to pass information to people in your own chain (up or down). The latter type of meetings tend to be short, and the former would be greatly alleviated by this kind of organization, because "units" would be cross-attached, and so any given project would not have responsible groups outside the management chain with whom coordination is necessary.
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