Want Your Company To Move Fast?
Act like a startup.
What do startups not have? Revenue, customers….
Also, they don’t have:
- a lot of meetings
- too many layers of hierarchy
- too much thought about growth and titles (sometimes called “politics”)
If you want to move as fast as the startup that may be coming after your business, then focus on having more individual contributors than managers, directors and VPs, reduce the number of hops to get from visionaries (CEO?) to the individual contributors, and throw all the main actors/groups into the same open office settings and let them communicate often and freely. Yes, the engineers, the designers, the quants, the stakeholders, and even, sporadically, the CEO, sit closely while they work at accelerated speeds.
Do provide private spaces for the inevitable and necessary handling of personal calls, and provide varied seating arrangements, such as booths and couches, but don’t let walls and distance to become blockers.
Make the managers be responsible for status collection and updates to execs, but make them be more focused on eliminating roadblocks for the individual contributors, than on trying to make the hierarchy look good. Managers should be the guardians of speediness, and presciently addressing issues.
Want the opposite? Spend your precious resources on creating an awesome management tower, making everyone, especially the few individual contributors you’ve managed to afford, see that what matters most isn’t getting work done, but doing it in a way that gets you up the tower.
CriticalMusings 