Re:Nest’s time at Alphabet
by saalweachter on Sunday June 05, 2016 @10:18PM
(#11844241)
I'm not sure I believe that's an intentional strategy or just a side-effect of size and the philosophy of letting teams start projects on their own.
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".
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".