Sunday, November 23, 2008

19 Ways to Survive the Crisis Without Firing People


Here is one thing I learned from studying military strategy:

Strategy is a game of interaction and isolation:


For example:
  • Cost Accounting and Functional Organization isolate ones own forces.

  • Institute Management by Walking Around. See
  • Eliminate fear by _rewarding_ failures the organization can learn from.


Now get off your butt and do it!


Jason Yip said...

Note that Toyota uses matrix management.

The benefit of functional organisation has always been in developing expertise. The value of that shouldn't be underestimated.

I think the issue is less about the type of organisation and more about how we differentiate between responsibility and authority.

Henrik said...

Absolutely right about functional organization being excellent för education. But:

1. Boydian network organisations do have functional units responsible för education. You get a lot more training and education in that kind of organisation than in a functional organisation.

2. Functional org. aim to keep you busy all the time, so there is very little time for training. Functional org also keep workers separate when working, so there is little opportunity to exchange information while working. For example, the Volvo corporate standard mandates that:
a. Programmers sit at corner desks in square cells, so they all have their backs turned to each other.
b. Desk assignments are fixed. Consequently, programmers in the same project do usually not sit in the same cell.
c. Training has mostly Been replaced by standardising tools and frameworks.

Henrik said...

>I think the issue is less about the
>type of organisation and more about
>how we differentiate between
>responsibility and authority.

Functional organization is a way of differentiating between responsibility and authority. So is network organization.

Taylor put authority at the top, and accountability at the bottom. It is not what he intended to do, but it is the result of the way he built the organizational structure. (Taylor intended managers to take on much more accountability than they usually do. He failed to introduce systemic affordances ensuring that they did.)

Taylor believed workers are to unintelligent to be educated, hence they must always be monitored closely and told what to do. This became one of the foundations of functional organization.

Boyd, on the other hand, believed in putting authority and authority together. Management defines objectives and strategy. Workers (soldiers, originally) decide how to carry the work out.

Boyd believed people are capable of intelligent decisions, provided they have the right education and the right environment. This is one of the foundations of the Boydian network organization.

Henrik said...

>Note that Toyota uses matrix >management.

As I understand it, Toyota uses cross-functional management, which is derived from matrix management, but substantially different.

Cross-functional management is a systems approach, a way of making different functional units cooperate better.

Matrix management works at the project level. I have worked in organizations that use matrix organizations, and in organizations that do not. Working without matrix management has been a lot easier than working with it.

DeMarco made a god case against matrix management in Slack.

Henrik said...

> Boyd, on the other hand, believed
> in putting authority and authority
> together.

Should be:

Boyd, on the other hand, believed in putting authority and responsibility together.

Henrik said...

BTW, Jeffrey Liker wrote about Toyota's matrix management in The Toyota Way, p. 178-179.

Though he calls it matrix management, the description is of cross-functional management.

The term matrix management gets fuzzy sometimes. Wikipedia defines three different kinds of matrix management.

Panu Kinnari said...

Nice list. Have to look into stuff you mentioned as some of it was new to me. Well, at least the acronyms were :)

Henrik said...

Please let me know if you get stuck on finding out more. Some of the stuff, like the IOHAI concept, is difficult to find material about. It is possible to find material about the same ideas under different names, or, more frequently, not labeled at all.

I am writing a book about Strategic Navigation, a business strategy method. The first third is devoted to Insight, the first I in IOHAI. It is mainly about different aspects of Systems Thinking.

The best IOHAI figure I've got is this one:

The image is from this article:

The article also has an embedded webcast about the effects of fear in organizations, and what to do about it.

Anonymous said...
