XARK 3.0

  • Xark began as a group blog in June 2005 but continues today as founder Dan Conover's primary blog-home. Posts by longtime Xark authors Janet Edens and John Sloop may also appear alongside Dan's here from time to time, depending on whatever.

Xark media


  • ALIENS! SEX! MORE ALIENS! AND DUBYA, TOO! Handcrafted, xarky science fiction, lovingly typeset for your home printer!

  • XARK TV

  • XARKAGANDA

  • XARKTOONS
Blog powered by Typepad
Member since 06/2005

Statcounter has my back

« Husbands panicking on Mother's Day | Main | Splimerick No. 1 »

Monday, May 12, 2008

Comments

Feed You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

Daniel

Control doesn't scale. It's the lesson of our age, as well as the lesson of democracy. You give up control, but you get back initiative and creativity and buy-in.

You clamp down and cut off and assert your authority and pretty soon all you're controlling are your own excuses.

Rocky

Daniel - Or maybe control does scale -- into super-sized -- but results don't? Or a curve that reverses, where up to some point there are "economies of scale" but past that point the economies start canabalizing on the results that took them to that point?

Dewey - Wonder how the "business schoolers" would respond to your analysis? And I wonder what Google's turnover rate is? With 19,000 employees, it wouldn't take a high percentage leaving to look like a lot. Could be a real tribute to Google's hiring and employee engagement practices that they actually engage some of their employees in what they're doing so much that they want to go do it for themselves. What a model for entrepreneurial success they are! Probably anyone with an entrepreneurial bent who winds up in that culture becomes even more entrepreneurially inclined. Gosh, darn! Google certainly should control that.

Janet

I think control doesn't scale. The bigger the company, the more managers and resources they have, the less power they have to react quickly to changing markets; to get things done rapidly; to change internal, inefficient processes; even to monitor and control their individual employees (ask KBR about that).

I read somewhere that in many major companies, it takes an average of SEVEN people to make decisions. Even if each only took a day, that's a more than a work week.

In a world where you are mostly selling the same thing in the same way you did 20 years ago, you can have big lumbering corporations.

In this world, you can, oinly if you change how they operate. Which Google is attempting to do. The fact that "business experts" don't see this shows how far behind they are.

It's too bad, but the cluetrain done left the station.

The comments to this entry are closed.