When I gave my talk at LOLapps.com and mentioned this, someone from the audience asked me this insightful question: "How do you learn to recognize these deadlock situations? How do you hire or train someone to recognize these types of situation?" My initial response was that if the founder/executive team doesn't recognize these, you have a problem. My next response was to point him at one of my favorite organizational analysis textbooks: The Fifth Discipline
The Beer Game also taught me to see how important open-ness and widespread dissemination of information was inside organizations, and I think Google in particular was very good at staying open despite all the pressures to do otherwise. Everyone I spoke to knew that we had a problem, and everyone was aware that the person responsible for trying to solve the problem was trying to do their best. This made organizational change much easier than it would have been otherwise (though it still wasn't easy). When confronted with situations like this, organizations tend to want to find an outside savior: someone who can ride in on a white horse from outside the company to save it. However, this is precisely the wrong approach, because the real problem usually has to do with the organization's approach to the problem, and that's much more easily changed by an insider.
By far the thing that impressed me the most was what a skilled organizational hacker Wayne Rosing was. When he saw that the previous approaches wasn't working, Rosing decided to take the problem and hand it to an engineer with previous experience in the domain! In other words, everyone knew that if Ron Dolin came and asked you for help, this was an important situation and critical for the IPO. If Wayne Rosing was at Google today, I'm convinced he would take that approach again with respect to a "Head of Social" position, which is to take an engineer well-versed in the social world and ask him to fix the problem. I don't know who that would be (my nomination would be Matt Cutts) but I'm positive it would be a better solution than a search for an outside Head of Social. The need in this case isn't for someone with external credibility, but for someone who can hack the organization from the inside to recognize that the important problems are the unknown unknowns.
1 comment:
Hi
This is Rikki from blink Solution. We are a start up company. I would be really interested on taking your inputs.
Post a Comment