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Understanding how bureaucracy develops

(dhruvmethi.substack.com)
192 points dhruvmethi | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.416s | source
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wavemode ◴[] No.41889855[source]
In my experience, the more siloed an organization, the more bureaucracy you end up with.

We've all had those experiences where, the problem we are trying to solve isn't inherently difficult - it's difficult because three separate teams are in charge of parts A, B, and C of the problem, and getting them to talk to each other, align their roadmaps, change their processes, etc. is impossible, unless you can go above their heads and force them to do it.

I think about organization design similarly to software design. It's tempting to think about your software design from the top-down, and design a hierarchy of siloed interfaces with encapsulated private data and strictly separated concerns. This looks beautiful on paper, but then in practice you now have to navigate through a sea of objects and abstractions and redundancies - getting anything meaningful done often requires "punching holes" through the siloes so data can be shared.

Organizations are the same way. Paul Graham wrote an essay[0] recently about the differences between "founder mode" and "manager mode". In a nutshell, managers usually think about organizations as silos - we divide up the company into a hierarchy of departments and teams and levels, so that only directors talk to middle managers and only middle managers talk to supervisors and only supervisors talk to the individual contributors. Again, it looks great on paper, and is what most people are used to.

But "founder mode" is when someone with a lot of political capital can step in and say, "you know what, I want to talk to the people on the ground. I want to find out what's actually going on below the surface in the org, not just the pre-packaged PowerPoint version I hear from my directors. I want to pull together people from across teams and across levels and across departments - whoever is best suited to making this project a success." I think that sort of "hole punching" can be really powerful, if the company's culture is amenable to it.

[0]: https://paulgraham.com/foundermode.html

replies(1): >>41891286 #
liquidpele ◴[] No.41891286[source]
To a founder, the success of the company means their own success. To a manager, success is to climb a ladder, any ladder. Their incentives are very different, and thus how they approach things will be.
replies(1): >>41895190 #
1. dennis_jeeves2 ◴[] No.41895190[source]
The question I have grappled with is, can a manager ever be made to feel like he has a sake in the company it in the true sense? Companies do attempt to have partners and share purchase plans but a true ownership may be out of reach, unless the founder makes sincere attempts to include the manager in decision making etc. Even then I suspect a founder may fail.
replies(1): >>41896545 #
2. ◴[] No.41896545[source]