Wild lions and the design of a new kind of company
As MindValley grows in new people and new ventures - how can we maximize happiness and profit?
Let’s tap the brain of a guy who funded 80 startups with a total of about 200 founders, with a pretty good hit rate (conception to acquisition / profitability).
Yes, it’s Paul Graham. One of my favorite brains to tap.
Read his essay "You weren’t meant to have a boss" as he talks about
- Optimal group size for work
- The way humans naturally work in groups
- Struggles in designing a structure to avoid becoming a "big company"
- Lions hunting in the wild
In the article, he ponders the same problems we are trying to solve….
"A large organization could only avoid slowing down if they avoided tree structure. And since human nature limits the size of group that can work together, the only way I can imagine for larger groups to avoid tree structure would be to have no structure: to have each group actually be independent, and to work together the way components of a market economy do.
That might be worth exploring. I suspect there are already some highly partitionable businesses that lean this way. But I don’t know any technology companies that have done it." ~ Paul Graham, from "You weren’t meant to have a boss"
Personally, I want to solve this problem. Not theoretically, but I want it to work in action. It’s a great problem to solve, as the solution (perhaps lessons other organizations and startups can use) will unlock a world of talent, innovation, and happiness at work.
Solving this might take some fancy experiments with organizational structure, radical thinking, consistent hard work, a bit of patience, and a group of people who dare… which is why I’m grateful to solve this with MindValley.
We’re doing some crazy stuff right now, but I’ll only talk about it when we have RESULTS. Till then, do share your workplace experiments and thoughts, if any.
March 26th, 2008 at 9:20 pm
Hi Khailee, here is Juan from Argentina. This it is really an interesting topic.
From my experience working in BIG organizations (IBM, for ex.) and smalls ones (my AIESEC LC or my own small company) I write my point of view.
Perhaps you’ve read it but I can suggest this book:
The Starfish and the Spider - The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations (Hardcover)
http://www.amazon.com/Starfish-Spider-Unstoppable-Leaderless-Organizations/dp/1591841437
Some extra info: http://www.starfishandspider.com/index.php?title=About_the_Book
It gives some really good advices for growing an Organization avoiding “tree structure”
I think not all advices are applyable, at least without doing some modifications, there are some “out of the box” ideas.
From my perspective the problem is that it is difficult or hard to pay the cost of this organizations because you have to live with some “irrational” decisions.
- should tolerate that perhaps the organization it is making the same thing twice. You can try to avoid this by Blogs (for ex. Google Blogs http://googleblog.blogspot.com/) or Wikis… but if someone does not read it… you duplicate efforts! And that is hard to accept
- should tolerate a loss of political power if you have small groups with more freedom and less processes
- should tolerate another leaderships styles in those small groups
- should share some revenue with the small groups
In the other hand you will have a flexible, funny, innovative organization.
For me the keyword is: FRAMEWORK
The image is: It is very difficult (if not impossible) to have a very fast, flexible and innovative 2000 persons structure, with good communication, etc. but is is possible to have 100 mini teams of 20 persons running under the same FRAMEWORK
A Leader that wants to grow an Organization avoiding the “tree structure” you should create a strong FRAMEWORK and allow descentralization. You can only empower (and control if you want) to use that FRAMEWORK.
Let’s think about wikipedia, or kazaa, or any opensource project. It is fun to collaborate. If you agree with the FRAMEWORK you are ok. Or let’s think about AIESEC or JCI.
In the practice I think that Scrum Meetings and Agile Methodologies but applying rotation methods (you are not going to be in the same Scrum all the weeks) can be a cheap solution for this.
I don´t want to leave a “bible comment” so I’ll stop. Anyway I hope we can talk about this topic personally. I’m very excited to join Mindvalley soon.
Let me know your thoughts about my oppinion. I wanna learn from this.
Hugs, JIM
March 27th, 2008 at 3:41 am
hey dude thx for sharing!!! im going out to buy the book immediately. look forward to having a deeper face to face discussion abt this :)
March 30th, 2008 at 8:17 pm
After working for big multinationals for the past 5 years … I finally got to work in a startup environment … work satisfaction has never been so gret … hmmmm
However, big corporations do have its benefits … especially for those who enjoy laying back and want job security ….
July 20th, 2008 at 9:39 pm
I find this blog very interesting, i will be here everyday till now. Greetings