I subscribe to a couple
of email circulars that have nothing to do with my day job in an effort to keep
an open mind and keep an eye on how the rest of the non technology focused
world lives. One of these is my daily update from The Browser. At the bottom of their
daily email there is a “Video of the Day” which I try and watch (so long as
it’s less than 5 minutes). On a recent trip to California I was pretty jet
lagged and so ended up looking at the following video at about 2AM. I thought
it was brilliant, both the song and especially the video. I saw that the video was created by a guy called Christophe Throckler, and it turns out he actually lives in France.
For no particular reason I decided to send him an out of the blue email to tell
him that I really liked his work. He responded almost instantly and said he was
very flattered and happy to receive such positive feedback. It was a simple and
enjoyable exchange of views with a complete stranger. Christophe makes video.
Aidan likes video. Aidan tells Christophe he likes video. Christophe thanks
Aidan for saying he likes his video he made. I was reminded of this simplicity
when I received a comment from my uncle, via my Dad, on a previous blog posting in
which I tried to explain my working world. Uncle Ed essentially said, “Oh my
word, that is so complicated… I am a bee keeper, I sell honey”. He’s right. I
think about the ridiculous number of hoops we go through in the corporate world
and I wonder if there isn’t a better way. I now think there might be…
About 18 months ago I
remember being in a training course. A very smart chap, who I found very
impressive in a noticeably understated way, led it. Amongst other things he had
been an advisor to the board of directors of Disney Pixar (and had therefore
worked with the late Steve Jobs amongst others). I remember him saying that
many companies today develop matrix organizations (where people essentially
belong to at least two groups at all times) to deal with the complexity of the
business world today. However I am increasingly thinking that this is a cop
out.
An article I read last week, my experience in EMC over the last 9 months of
building offerings by way of creating virtual teams and then SWAT teams of ring-fenced individuals, and my general belief in
libertarianism and meritocracies, means that I am increasingly convinced that what
Haier are doing could be the basis of a much better solution for the future of
the corporate world. In short my idea runs something like this…
The big boss sets out
the strategic direction. People are then encouraged to create projects to help
achieve that objective. Once the initial project idea has been approved, (you
can decide on how high or low you want to set the bar – i.e. you can determine
how well defined the idea has to be before it gets executive approval), people
in the organization are then allowed to choose which projects they want to be a
part of. Given that people typically want to be associated with successful
projects, people will naturally gravitate towards those team leaders and
projects that they think will be most successful. This will actually force communication,
collaboration and the building of networks across the whole company. People who
lead well will also rise to the top. Clearly any company wanting to work like
this would need to put in place top-notch remote working facilities e.g.
Telepresence suites, collaboration tools and high speed internet connections
etc., and I still don’t know exactly how this is funded and tracked from a
P&L perspective.
I wonder if it could
work in a similar way to school vouchers i.e. funding would move with the
individual…employees effectively choose how they spend their personal time (and
budget) on the understanding that they will be asked at the end of the year to
show the results they have achieved based on their decisions about where they
have spent their time…People would feel more in control of their careers and
would gravitate towards work that interested them (people are always more
productive when they are doing something they enjoy). More senior employees
would be expected to show a greater return given that their budgets (cost) is
higher; people would start to be more aware of how much they and their time
actually cost which would likely reduce time spent slacking on the job; project
leads could not just accept new team members regardless because as investment
into the project increased, the overall project would be required to
demonstrate a greater return on investment; people who no team lead feels would
add sufficient value to their projects would naturally get weeded out. Such a
funding model could also even lead to increased collaboration with outside
groups who would effectively represent extra hands without having to have
additional internal employees commit their personal budgets – i.e. a project
lead could achieve a greater potential return from a project for the same
(internal) input.
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