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These are great qualities for making a team which follows orders and makes field decisions within a extremely narrow scope. These are terrible qualities for te

These are great qualities for making a team which follows orders and makes field decisions within a extremely narrow scope. These are terrible qualities for teams who are self-assigned, entrepreneurial, and have to disrupt standard accepted behaviors in order to create new products. For example in Number 4: How does this work when the teams assignment is to come up with an objective, rather than just have one assigned to them. Answer: They would splinter and struggle because they are following a chain of command. Which follows to Number 1: To make products you need a diverse set of leaders who share authority in varying decisions, not a chain of people who wrongly think themselves to be universal experts. This does require Number 3, but in a different cultural fashion that isn't so rigidly hierarchical. Basically these are great for teams who just take commands from the actual guy makes the decisions. Google and the NYT are interested in the teams that make decisions. I think the modern workplace is actually trying to UNDO these very narrow minded and ultimately damaging behaviors and their misapplication to the creation process.

linkregister 11y ago
> makes field decisions within a extremely narrow scope. What? Modern Western armed forces, and especially special forces units, make many independent decisions requiring great amounts of creativity and initiative. The hallmark of over 300 years of Western military units is the ability to operate without consulting the chain of command for every decision. Were you a member of an armed force from a more centralized military, such as Russia or China? If so, then your perspective makes more sense.
vonmoltke 11y ago
I know this is probably an unpopular idea around here, but I generally think "self-assigned" teams are a terrible idea. Without a top-level roadmap to guide progress a company would quickly devolve into an uncoordinated mess. Sure, it can birth some really innovative gems from a very large organization. That's the exception rather than the rule, though. This kind of "teams making decisions" structure nearly killed Sony when they started infighting and reinventing wheels. Google, IMO, succeeds in spite of rather than because of this structure at this point, and only because of their ridiculously high hiring bar. There is a middle ground between Google and, say, Lockheed where teams are given a general direction to pull to keep them organized and working towards the company's goals but are otherwise free to determine how to accomplish those goals on their own.
AndrewKemendo 11y ago
No offense but I don't think you understand Special Operations. You are describing how conventional forces largely operate. SOF on the other hand are typically given a problem and asked to figure out a solution. Watch Charlie Wilson's war or read any of the books about the weeks after 9/11 in Afghanistan as a good example of this in practice. For example in Number 4: How does this work when the teams assignment is to come up with an objective, rather than just have one assigned to them. Answer: They would splinter and struggle because they are following a chain of command. This is completely wrong. In fact the majority of the problems SOF are given are within the domain of objective identification for effects. When problems come down, everyone works together equally (back to the communication piece) to come up with a solution just like we do with startups. When it's time to execute, you execute within that chain and take direction based on your role. Basically these are great for teams who just take commands from the actual guy makes the decisions. Again, that's not how it works. Often the "commands" are even more nebulous than within narrow software domains. For example: "Keep [wartorn city] stable enough to allow for elections to run."
- tsunamifury 11y ago
  I think your answer shows how you are already narrowing and then differing to an authority to give you scope. Relative to you, that might seem like creation, but its actually just following through on a pre-planed, however vague, agenda. This is common among military-mindset types who scope out the problem they can't process and then claim to have solved it. They are rightly trained to ignore what is "above their pay grade." The "higher pay grade" problem a team must solve in your example is to shift a popular mindset in a region to inspire them to create elections, not keep the city safe while elections occur as assigned from your superior officer. These teams need to decide the human social agenda, not just the strategy and execution of one given to them.
  - AndrewKemendo 11y ago
    narrowing and then differing to an authority to give you scope. I think the difference is that you assume that is not happening in the entrepreneurial world. In fact it is, only guided by consumer demand, or some broadly defined corporate niche or group of uncoordinated individuals [1]. But that gets off the point however. Lets be clear here though, the scope of the article was how Google builds teams within the already defined "higher pay grade" problems. So by definition that is the context of what I am discussing teams already within a system. As it relates to Google they have "higher pay grade orders" from the Executive team of Page/Brin etc.... This is not Valve we are talking about here. I think you are trying to make a larger statement about entreprenurial endeavors in sum total at the economy level which is not the scope of this discussion and it not relevant. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessne...
Numberwang 11y ago
Agreed. Visit any Swedish workplace and OP will be shocked that anything is getting done at all with the total lack of hierarchies.
anonymousguy 11y ago
Contrary to popular belief the personalities that appear most successful in the military are those that tend to be the most independent and anti-conformist. As a counterpoint everybody follows a chain of command. In all the corporate jobs I have held I never experienced a chain of command noticeably different from the military. Just like in corporate world the military allows you some latitude to push back on your leaders if they make a completely disastrous decision. The primary difference there is that you are more motivated to push back if a bad decision could mean increased risk to security (people's lives). I have never experienced this level of critical impasse in the corporate world. The military is mostly like working for a corporate employer with some key differences: * In theory the military expects everybody to be a leader, though in practice not everybody is willing to step up and make leader-like decisions or in some cases toxic leaders will suppress the opportunity. * The military is a really big bureaucracy, which can constrict many creative (unorthodox) leadership decisions, but sometimes produces extremely unorthodox solutions to work around the bureaucracy. * There are points in the military where you are demanded to work really long hours (like 12-16 hours, 6 or 7 days a week). In that amount of time everybody's personality is hyper-amplified. Some people can make this work really make their teams gel, where other people become terminal destructive forces. * The military is often really bad at a constant work pace. Consider the phrase "hurry up and wait". You tend to get really good at accomplishing tasks at 4x human speed so that you can go back to being paid to self-study or watch movies. * Look at how hard your corporate CEO works, the number of simultaneous tasks they have to balance, and the constant uncertainty in their schedules and travel. When you deploy in the military the entire team works at that tempo all the time. * You don't get to be a conformist tool as a military technician, because then the bureaucracy will crush your soul. You quickly learn to invent your own solution to many common problems. This is substantially less true of many corporate software developers.
kamaal 11y ago
>> To make products you need a diverse set of leaders who share authority in varying decisions, not a chain of people who wrongly think themselves to be universal experts. Works fine in case of actual universal experts Steve Jobs's, Jonathan Ive's, Larry Wall's or Linus Torvald's of the world. That argument begins to break down when you appoint the wrong people to that job. You now have to follow orders only because some one is giving them, not because they are right.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

linkregister 11y ago

> makes field decisions within a extremely narrow scope. What? Modern Western armed forces, and especially special forces units, make many independent decisions requiring great amounts of creativity and initiative. The hallmark of over 300 years of Western military units is the ability to operate without consulting the chain of command for every decision. Were you a member of an armed force from a more centralized military, such as Russia or China? If so, then your perspective makes more sense.

vonmoltke 11y ago

I know this is probably an unpopular idea around here, but I generally think "self-assigned" teams are a terrible idea. Without a top-level roadmap to guide progress a company would quickly devolve into an uncoordinated mess. Sure, it can birth some really innovative gems from a very large organization. That's the exception rather than the rule, though. This kind of "teams making decisions" structure nearly killed Sony when they started infighting and reinventing wheels. Google, IMO, succeeds in spite of rather than because of this structure at this point, and only because of their ridiculously high hiring bar. There is a middle ground between Google and, say, Lockheed where teams are given a general direction to pull to keep them organized and working towards the company's goals but are otherwise free to determine how to accomplish those goals on their own.

AndrewKemendo 11y ago

No offense but I don't think you understand Special Operations. You are describing how conventional forces largely operate. SOF on the other hand are typically given a problem and asked to figure out a solution. Watch Charlie Wilson's war or read any of the books about the weeks after 9/11 in Afghanistan as a good example of this in practice. For example in Number 4: How does this work when the teams assignment is to come up with an objective, rather than just have one assigned to them. Answer: They would splinter and struggle because they are following a chain of command. This is completely wrong. In fact the majority of the problems SOF are given are within the domain of objective identification for effects. When problems come down, everyone works together equally (back to the communication piece) to come up with a solution just like we do with startups. When it's time to execute, you execute within that chain and take direction based on your role. Basically these are great for teams who just take commands from the actual guy makes the decisions. Again, that's not how it works. Often the "commands" are even more nebulous than within narrow software domains. For example: "Keep [wartorn city] stable enough to allow for elections to run."

tsunamifury 11y ago
I think your answer shows how you are already narrowing and then differing to an authority to give you scope. Relative to you, that might seem like creation, but its actually just following through on a pre-planed, however vague, agenda. This is common among military-mindset types who scope out the problem they can't process and then claim to have solved it. They are rightly trained to ignore what is "above their pay grade." The "higher pay grade" problem a team must solve in your example is to shift a popular mindset in a region to inspire them to create elections, not keep the city safe while elections occur as assigned from your superior officer. These teams need to decide the human social agenda, not just the strategy and execution of one given to them.
- AndrewKemendo 11y ago
  narrowing and then differing to an authority to give you scope. I think the difference is that you assume that is not happening in the entrepreneurial world. In fact it is, only guided by consumer demand, or some broadly defined corporate niche or group of uncoordinated individuals [1]. But that gets off the point however. Lets be clear here though, the scope of the article was how Google builds teams within the already defined "higher pay grade" problems. So by definition that is the context of what I am discussing teams already within a system. As it relates to Google they have "higher pay grade orders" from the Executive team of Page/Brin etc.... This is not Valve we are talking about here. I think you are trying to make a larger statement about entreprenurial endeavors in sum total at the economy level which is not the scope of this discussion and it not relevant. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessne...

Numberwang 11y ago

Agreed. Visit any Swedish workplace and OP will be shocked that anything is getting done at all with the total lack of hierarchies.

anonymousguy 11y ago

Contrary to popular belief the personalities that appear most successful in the military are those that tend to be the most independent and anti-conformist. As a counterpoint everybody follows a chain of command. In all the corporate jobs I have held I never experienced a chain of command noticeably different from the military. Just like in corporate world the military allows you some latitude to push back on your leaders if they make a completely disastrous decision. The primary difference there is that you are more motivated to push back if a bad decision could mean increased risk to security (people's lives). I have never experienced this level of critical impasse in the corporate world. The military is mostly like working for a corporate employer with some key differences: * In theory the military expects everybody to be a leader, though in practice not everybody is willing to step up and make leader-like decisions or in some cases toxic leaders will suppress the opportunity. * The military is a really big bureaucracy, which can constrict many creative (unorthodox) leadership decisions, but sometimes produces extremely unorthodox solutions to work around the bureaucracy. * There are points in the military where you are demanded to work really long hours (like 12-16 hours, 6 or 7 days a week). In that amount of time everybody's personality is hyper-amplified. Some people can make this work really make their teams gel, where other people become terminal destructive forces. * The military is often really bad at a constant work pace. Consider the phrase "hurry up and wait". You tend to get really good at accomplishing tasks at 4x human speed so that you can go back to being paid to self-study or watch movies. * Look at how hard your corporate CEO works, the number of simultaneous tasks they have to balance, and the constant uncertainty in their schedules and travel. When you deploy in the military the entire team works at that tempo all the time. * You don't get to be a conformist tool as a military technician, because then the bureaucracy will crush your soul. You quickly learn to invent your own solution to many common problems. This is substantially less true of many corporate software developers.

kamaal 11y ago

>> To make products you need a diverse set of leaders who share authority in varying decisions, not a chain of people who wrongly think themselves to be universal experts. Works fine in case of actual universal experts Steve Jobs's, Jonathan Ive's, Larry Wall's or Linus Torvald's of the world. That argument begins to break down when you appoint the wrong people to that job. You now have to follow orders only because some one is giving them, not because they are right.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]