Don’t Become a Bureaucratic Pyramid
After decades of scientific study, researchers know what managers should do to maximize value for customers, workers, shareholders… and thus themselves.
Most don’t do it.
Most established companies never will.
One alternative to the pyramid
Startups have the opportunity to:
- Radically empower workers to maximize internal motivation;
- Decentralize decision-making to keep most of it closer to customers;
- Flatten the organization to minimize manager hiring while providing other means for advancement;
- Focus on the highest priorities, not forecasts and project plans;
- Complete those priorities one increment at a time, to improve quality and limit rework;
- Coach rather than control the adults working with them;
- Share everything you legally can with workers and be transparent with customers; and
- Satisfy workers and customers more that bureaucracies ever will.
Among other benefits, this speeds development without more burn or burnout; saves money by delaying new hires; and scales to improve return-on-assets over the long term.
With each new hire, your company’s complexity grows exponentially. Here is the formula:
n(n–1)/2
The result is the number of communication channels in your company, each a potential source of failure… or efficiency. Seven people equals 21 channels; 10 equals 45. Growing less than 50% as one small team more than doubles complexity, and that ratio worsens with each new member.
So if you have at least 6 people on your team, the time has already come to address structure and process in radical yet science-backed ways. Learn what researchers say about the timing.
