OTOH, a little bit of internal competition to penalize complacency, if there's not too much wasting of resources, is probably a good thing. It's been fairly common IME for different teams to be working on very related concepts (eg, HPC platforms for different tasks), with a sort of implicit understanding that the team that does well will be able to do the logical extension of the project, and the team that doesn't will work on something else.
Sure you do. It allows someone at the top to flip the switch between market and central command. Ideal firm size and vertical consolidation varies between industries, and plausibly varies in different environments, different times, etc.
Looks like the joke is on the winning team.
I don't buy the "first to win argument", but it would seem useful to take multiple approaches to solving the same or similar problems.
One of the thorniest problems in business economics is this: we know free markets produce extraordinary results, but why is it that even in the absence of regulation, so little of the economy is structured as a free market? Very few businesses of any size operate internally as a market, instead they usually operate under hierarchical command and control. Markets generally exist only at the interfaces between organizations.
Why don't teams bid competitively within a company? How do individuals decide on the teams to form? Why are managers allowed to rise to the point of failure? Why do we pay people salaries instead of hourly wages? Why do we hire hourly wage labor as if though its was permanent?
The number of questions raised by this topic is endless.
The most general explanation is this: yes, companies adopt inefficient structures, but they more than make up for this through significantly reduced transaction costs.
Nations almost all adopt an executive system because nations compete. The U.N. doesn't because Earth doesn't have to compete with anything else. Imagine a competitive interplanetary situation and you can bet the Secretary General of the U.N. would quickly gain significant decision making powers.
Collectivist market philosophies tend to be built on the assumption that there will be no competition internally and thus can be run by various committees. However, even countries trying to follow various types of collectivist ideologies ended up with single executive-types at the top, again because countries compete.
On the small scale, many indigenous tribal systems rely on a council during times of peace, and elect an executive (sometimes called a "war chief") during times of war.
The phrase "business is war" is particularly appropriate since most businesses operate like they're at war.
That's how the Roman Republic operated, too: the Senate would elect a dictator for six months to handle certainly irregular situations. Unlike any other Roman official, he had no colleague who could countermand his orders, and he was not legally liable for any act he committed in office.
Could you give an example of this? Are you talking about using contractors to get through a project, and then keeping them on indefinitely after the project is over?
At the current cost of hourly labor if you made it even more like temporary labor than it already is the quality of worker you could obtain at that price would be terrible.
If you believe current US (at least for most of the population) law theory, all employment relationships are completely at-will. They may be terminated at any time for any reason. I would argue that is all that is required for a free market. This would seem to contradict the claim that most companies to not internally operate as a market.
I know there exist serious breaches of this freedom (ie. slavery), but it is not supposed to be the norm anymore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm
although I think fiatmoney is conflating a centrally planned command economy with communism.
Seems like a distinction without a difference, considering that every time a nation tries to implement the latter they end up with the former as an "intermediate stage" of the revolution that somehow never goes away.
In a corporate body, there is no pretense that central planning is a transitional stage. There are a few exceptions like Valve and Zappos, but even fewer genuine success stories where a non-hierarchical structure has outperformed traditional ones in the long run.
http://www.inc.com/audacious-companies/leigh-buchanan/mornin...
(1) Top management tells everybody what to do. Result: No initiative from low-level employees.
(2) In case of conflicting projects, top management decides which team should continue. Result: Rampant internal politics.
(3) In case of conflicting projects, let all of them continue, and see which project wins the market. Result: Wasting resources; company looks disorganized to outsiders.
Some other companies (Apple?) avoid the problem by sticking to (1). However, many Google employees joined in the first place thanks to the tale of "A company where you can work on the problem you want to": it will be very tough for them to ditch the model wholesale, and it may harm the company in the long run.
I think Google does a bit of all three. While Google could certainly do better in some cases, it's not like Google's willfully ignoring an obvious solution.
The more confusing one was web vs. native - there were a dozen sessions on progressive webapps, yet they barely got a mention in the keynote, while Instant Apps got a full showcase. Internal competition is all very well, but it's frustrating as a developer to not be able to get a clear answer as to which platform we ought to be developing for.
I've been reading "The Vital Question"[1] of late and it has been the first book in a while where I've had several "oh that makes so much sense!" moments. And one of the tenets is that Darwin was correct in the small, and wrong in the large understandings of evolution.
Something that jumped out to me while reading it, is that information extraction drives our technology systems like energy drives biological systems. Read the book and then sit back and analyze Twitter as a multi-cellular organism with information as energy and individuals as cells. A sort of Datasaurus. Fun stuff.
[1] "The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life" -- http://www.amazon.com/Vital-Question-Evolution-Origins-Compl... based on the recommendation tweeted by Gates and comments here, I read it through cover to cover while camping, and now going through a second reading to pick up what I overlooked the first time.
It really explains the sloppy state lots of Google products ship in.
"Limited divisibility of tasks. Adding more people to a highly divisible task such as reaping a field by hand decreases the overall task duration (up to the point where additional workers get in each others way). Some tasks are less divisible; Brooks points out that while it takes one woman nine months to make one baby, "nine women can't make a baby in one month"."
42 weeks overall
4.33 weeks in a month
42 weeks -> just shy of 10 months
I'm not so sure if you are ahead on weeks. But you are ahead on kids! Congratulations and good luck
Not that I want to derail the well-wishing!
Something similar happened to one of my previous employers. We were less than 100 people and cranking out many successful projects. Once we got acquired and nearly quadrupled in size, none of the projects succeeded. Many of the early contributors left one by one due to frustrations and pressure including me. The new management style had changed everything.
It is not uncommon for a software developer to be asked to keep a seat warm in an open office seating environment. It feels very unnatural to be expected to sit in front of a computer for 8 hours and be given nothing to do. Some people convince themselves that they are riding the gravy train, others go crazy and leave to find actual work.
So you couldn't propose just a new antenna, you had to propose using an entirely different spectrum with entirely different rules and an entirely different platform architecture where voice service was one of many options rather than the main option. You don't get to propose re-inventing the phone, you have to re-invent telecommunications. One of those that got out of the door when I was there was the Google "wave" project. Its vision was so big it missed the fact that people just wanted Slack[1].
Bottom line is that competition within a structure is good, its something that lots of organizations have applied successfully. Google's style, when I was there, was never structured enough to head toward anything. It always went all directions at once, leaving the organization with a net zero momentum in any direction.
[1] Yes they are nearly a decade different in time frame, but as a 'dogfood' wave user and then later outside of Google it was pretty clear the "win" was the IRC replacement, none of the vision stuff was getting much traction but it was the way to go if you're group wanted to figure out which cafe to go to lunch at that day.
Sounds like this was used as a bludgeon for attacking competitors.
Bottom line is that competition within a structure is good, its something that lots of organizations have applied successfully. Google's style, when I was there, was never structured enough to head toward anything. It always went all directions at once, leaving the organization with a net zero momentum in any direction.
My experience with such competition, is that groups actually tend to undermine each other instead of pulling together with cohesive effort. Here, the lowered cost of transactions within a company can allow other groups within a company to act as gatekeepers -- otherwise "enemy" in-company groups can be penalized with higher (outside company) transaction costs for getting things done. This is especially true when project budgets are made with in-company costs in mind.
Google is famously data driven (even when it hurts) and has taken a lot of criticism (justified in my opinion) about not being able to create any new business outside of search and search advertising. I saw, and commented on, the Alphabet re-org as a way to get better visibility into the data coming from the organization. Spend vs revenue. Robots aren't carrying their weight? Toss them over. Making cell phones too hard? Sell it off.
If you work in companies like this long enough you begin to recognize that the organization can constrain what products you can even attempt to build. When the Sun "Voyager" (aka the 'portable') came out we joked that Sun could build any computer it wanted to, as long as you didn't mind it looking like a workstation. A partner Tadpole had built an actual laptop. But the Sun hardware engineering organization couldn't get there from a clean sheet of paper.
For that reason alone it is critical that Google keep re-organizing until they find a formula that works for them.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/opinion/04brass.html?pa...
More to the point, isn't this exactly what Steve Jobs advised Larry Page not to do? Steve Jobs said, famously, to put "more wood behind fewer arrows". And for a while, it seems like the advice was sticking - Google shuttered a bunch of products (for better or for worse) and seemed to be buckling down to focus on the search and YouTube division. But now it seems like Google is going right back to how it used to be - many teams, working on many products, with no guarantee of ongoing development or support. It seems to me that Google is turning into the next Cisco.
Sure there are mistakes but I don't think it's top down "team x" compete with "team y". It's more like both teams don't know about each other until the projects are far along. At which point might as well see which one does better... Or at least that seems to be the attitude at google.
So you have two teams somewhere in a company start a project at the same time.
Your challenge is, what does the corporate structure need to look like such that these two teams learn about each other's project early enough to collaborate?
If you rely on project information being passed up and down the corporate ladder, until one person learns that two subtrees of his reports are working on the same project, that's never going to work because bandwidth is reduced as you go up the tree, so less and less information is passed up, and early/experimental projects will frequently not make the cut and get filtered out. So your LCB will never hear about both projects.
If you just rely on direct communication between teams, you've got an N-squared problem as you grow, so that will never work.
If you try to give each team a carved out domain, new projects will frequently exist in the "chocolate & peanut butter" intersections, and both the "chocolate" and "peanut butter" teams will start the same project.
It's a difficult problem, and I'm not sure there's an answer between "companies should be small".
My understand is that great product companies, like Apple, also have a kind of Darwinian development practice, but only ever reveal the "winner" once it's clear that it's the winner.
As an outsider, Apple looks like it has strategy and vision, while Google looks completely baffling, even releasing and pulling products from the market within weeks or releasing clearly incomplete, barely beta level products with no real vision and just expecting the public to sort it out.
I mean, how many chat apps is google up to now?
Interesting you say this as the first example that I can think of is Apple themselves when Steve Jobs was forced out of the Apple Lisa team and he joined the Macintosh team which then became in direct competition with the Apple Lisa team. I don't need to expunge on that but i found it to be a very famous case study on how 2 internal teams in direct competition affected the company.
I can't find any good citations online, but Electronic Arts was reputed to do that as well. Supposedly they'd put several developers on the same title, and whoever finished first got to ship.
Deming said this over 40 years ago:
"The present system includes competition between people, teams, departments, divisions, students, schools and universities. Although economists have taught that competition will solve our problems, we now know that competition is destructive."
If in the end it makes the best product it's probably worth the waste of having competing solutions. But that is kind of a big if. (I would say the iPhone passed that test, personally.)
It seems wasteful, but as we can see here, clearly the Nest work style couldn't compete with Google, and so no need to waste further R&D. But until you didn't the contest, how could you know?
In this case, however, given the prominence that was originally placed on the acquisition (at a time when Google had no direct presence in home automation), I suspect that the original vision was to actually merge the two worlds. The Google rank&file probably learnt very quickly how toxic Fadell was, and then proceeded to keep Nest at arms' length and do their own thing, basically writing off the acquisition and hoping it will eventually go away.
In 2015 Nest posted job listings for its "Nest Audio Team." The team would be responsible for "developing an audio roadmap for Nest products." Industry observers suspected the audio team was building a smart Bluetooth speaker, but Google beat Nest to the punch with Google Home, an Amazon Echo-style Bluetooth speaker and voice assistant appliance. According to a report from The Information, when Nest found out about Google Home, it asked to work on the project with Google. Nest's request was turned down. We can only guess why—maybe Nest's reputation inside Google had something to do with it?
Often times Google has multiple projects doing effectively the same "thing" going at the same time. They don't work together because the idea is to have the team that can get to the "finish line" first to win, not to co-operate. This, as it was explained to me by an engineering director there, was to encourage a 'natural selection mechanism that selected for the best teams and the best products.'
While I understood the idea, that you would pit your own resources against each other like that was kind of foreign to me. My own personal learning from that, having watched them for 15 years, four of which from the inside, is that as a way of managing a company it produces few viable products and no viable businesses.