I am noticing a trend: many companies are discussing "excessive layers of management." Normally, this would excite me, as I'm a fan of flatter (but not overly flat) organizations.
@John Cutler an interesting follow-on post would be about why organizations get “too short”. To your point, that there is such a thing as over-flattening.
I'm interested to see how you think about the reason for scaling. To be precise I don't believe or want to talk about a degrowth angle. For me its just that I Don't always understand why a company wants to hire more people. More people is automatically more complexity, which you want to avoid or only add if it brings more value. A multi feature product for example can service more different customers and so your business grows. But like I point out, I can only justify that in my mind in a multi product/service setup. If I hear stories that 100+ people are working on the spotify music player or there is a team that works on the like button at facebook. I'm really baffled: Why?
This is super interesting. When I did my research, I became interested in 'leadership at all levels'. To do my research I had to develop a stratification method that would be used multiple organisations in the public sector in the country I was researching.
My five functions job level framework is: operational, business, management, senior management and strategic
I also researched complexity leadership and complex adaptive systems, as organisational structues and the new, emerging flexible organisations.
Interesting that you wrote this piece, John. Literally the other way I was thinking about the whole big corporate paradigm and whether that’s sustainable in the world and era we live in… And I got myself curious about what someone like you would think of that…
@John Cutler an interesting follow-on post would be about why organizations get “too short”. To your point, that there is such a thing as over-flattening.
Its a topic I talks and deal with a lot.
I'm interested to see how you think about the reason for scaling. To be precise I don't believe or want to talk about a degrowth angle. For me its just that I Don't always understand why a company wants to hire more people. More people is automatically more complexity, which you want to avoid or only add if it brings more value. A multi feature product for example can service more different customers and so your business grows. But like I point out, I can only justify that in my mind in a multi product/service setup. If I hear stories that 100+ people are working on the spotify music player or there is a team that works on the like button at facebook. I'm really baffled: Why?
This is super interesting. When I did my research, I became interested in 'leadership at all levels'. To do my research I had to develop a stratification method that would be used multiple organisations in the public sector in the country I was researching.
My five functions job level framework is: operational, business, management, senior management and strategic
I also researched complexity leadership and complex adaptive systems, as organisational structues and the new, emerging flexible organisations.
Thanks for this!
Interesting that you wrote this piece, John. Literally the other way I was thinking about the whole big corporate paradigm and whether that’s sustainable in the world and era we live in… And I got myself curious about what someone like you would think of that…