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Caring (alternatively called engagement) is huge. Employees who care are curious enough to dig beyond their day job. And learn about their customers. And are

Caring (alternatively called engagement) is huge. Employees who care are curious enough to dig beyond their day job. And learn about their customers. And are willing to push back on authority when they know that they're right. The systems at very large public companies drive this behavior out of employees. (They value standardization and defending the existing business too much)

dasil003 10y ago
Agreed. However the issue is quite a bit more subtle because the larger the company the harder it is for employees to have the big picture on a purely logistical level. So it's not necessarily true that employees pushing back are right. That's not to say existing management structures are optimal. A big part of what the latest breed of tech giants has done is really optimize the culture to be able to get the best out of large teams of engineers, who themselves are force multipliers via code. The computers are essentially like perfectly obedient slave labor. In the old days you always needed a lot of man power, so the biggest organizations were all about rigid command and control structures and policies that would enable a large organization to function. Sometimes these organizations were defacto distributed systems with multi-month latencies (eg. The British Empire). Under that environment it's just not viable for individuals to question procedures on a regular basis or the whole thing breaks down. What companies like Facebook have done is come up with an organizational architecture that can use the perfect labor of computers to break through to a level of impact that could not be achieved by a human-powered organizations. There's probably still an upper limit to efficiency, but it's orders of magnitude higher given the right engineering leverage and culture.
- mathattack 10y ago
  Agreed. However the issue is quite a bit more subtle because the larger the company the harder it is for employees to have the big picture on a purely logistical level. So it's not necessarily true that employees pushing back are right. Yes - I've seen this too. The bigger the company, the longer you have to be there to understand all the far flung parts.
- orasis 10y ago
  "So it's not necessarily true that employees pushing back are right." I think we give managers and executives too much credit. The employees on the ground often know much better what's really going on. Said another way, if executives have it right and employees have it wrong, the organization structure is broken.
  - dasil003 10y ago
    I'm not giving them credit, they may be wrong too. The fact is there is non-trivial communication overhead and either or both sides can be wrong.
- walrus1066 10y ago
  'Sometimes these organizations were defacto distributed systems with multi-month latencies (eg. The British Empire).' Sorry if this is tangential, but the way the British empire managed it was by devolving almost all decision making and power to the people running the colonies. Like tax, law, culture, religion, language etc. Foreign policy was the only area where the crown called the shots. The result was a very loosely coupled, very flexible, and adaptable distributed system, where one part would look and act competently differently to another part (I.e. Canada vs India).

dasil003 10y ago

Agreed. However the issue is quite a bit more subtle because the larger the company the harder it is for employees to have the big picture on a purely logistical level. So it's not necessarily true that employees pushing back are right. That's not to say existing management structures are optimal. A big part of what the latest breed of tech giants has done is really optimize the culture to be able to get the best out of large teams of engineers, who themselves are force multipliers via code. The computers are essentially like perfectly obedient slave labor. In the old days you always needed a lot of man power, so the biggest organizations were all about rigid command and control structures and policies that would enable a large organization to function. Sometimes these organizations were defacto distributed systems with multi-month latencies (eg. The British Empire). Under that environment it's just not viable for individuals to question procedures on a regular basis or the whole thing breaks down. What companies like Facebook have done is come up with an organizational architecture that can use the perfect labor of computers to break through to a level of impact that could not be achieved by a human-powered organizations. There's probably still an upper limit to efficiency, but it's orders of magnitude higher given the right engineering leverage and culture.

mathattack 10y ago
Agreed. However the issue is quite a bit more subtle because the larger the company the harder it is for employees to have the big picture on a purely logistical level. So it's not necessarily true that employees pushing back are right. Yes - I've seen this too. The bigger the company, the longer you have to be there to understand all the far flung parts.
orasis 10y ago
"So it's not necessarily true that employees pushing back are right." I think we give managers and executives too much credit. The employees on the ground often know much better what's really going on. Said another way, if executives have it right and employees have it wrong, the organization structure is broken.
- dasil003 10y ago
  I'm not giving them credit, they may be wrong too. The fact is there is non-trivial communication overhead and either or both sides can be wrong.
walrus1066 10y ago
'Sometimes these organizations were defacto distributed systems with multi-month latencies (eg. The British Empire).' Sorry if this is tangential, but the way the British empire managed it was by devolving almost all decision making and power to the people running the colonies. Like tax, law, culture, religion, language etc. Foreign policy was the only area where the crown called the shots. The result was a very loosely coupled, very flexible, and adaptable distributed system, where one part would look and act competently differently to another part (I.e. Canada vs India).