3 ms·

1 in 6 people in Nokia are/were managers so the ratio sounds about right.

• jillesvangurp 3y ago
  I once counted the number of people between me and the CEO while in Nokia and I got to about 8 levels. It gets worse if you need something from elsewhere in such organizations. Because now you are communicating up the tree to some busy executive with no attention span who then barks down another path in the tree down to (hopefully) the right person you should be talking to directly. Of course doing the sensible thing here (talk directly) pisses off everybody along that path who justify their existence by gatekeeping their precious resources (i.e. people) and jealously control flows of information. I've been there and done that and have had to deal with such executives. Not fun to have your boss tell you that his boss got yelled at by their bosses because you had the nerve to send an email to a report of their report's report. This is a thing that happened to me. I was actually encouraged to continue to engage with "the other side" (as it was obviously the right thing to do) but please keep them (all of them) in the loop because it made them look like the bunch of useless muppets they were. In their defense, this was a tense time for them because there was this thing called the iphone that was an existential threat to the entire organization and people were very busy identifying the most dysfunctional bits in the org tree for firing as things were going rather poorly. I got caught up in one of the larger rounds eventually.
  • expertentipp 3y ago
    Got somehow similar experience, except software folks tended to mingle quite a lot and cooperate. But pushing through anything new or getting help... The hierarchies were brutal, the management were yuppies busy with business travel and "conferences". Things were somehow working or were absolutely impossible.