How to learn to be a big company manager?

http://dirtyaura.org/blog/2010/07/10/how-to-learn-to-be-a-big-company-manager/

by dirtyaura • 16 years ago

15 10 16 years ago

dirtyaura.org

growt• 16 years ago

read a lot of dilbert comics ;)

dkarl• 16 years ago

You should have left off the smiley.

Meeting of engineers, one engineer gives a presentation of a system that will be extremely expensive to integrate with, has unknown reliability, offers no benefit, will suck up the time of a lot of capable people, but we're going to integrate with it anyway, because we've been told this is part of our "direction."

Plus our division is going to be paying a crapload of money to some other division for the privilege of integrating this system, which will affect our bonuses. It's pretty easy to explain why this is a stupid idea, but the order came down from our boss's boss's boss's boss, and nobody is allowed to explain things to a boss's boss's boss's boss, not even our boss's boss. Especially when you want to explain that the thing she's doing to look good to her boss (and her boss's boss,) presumably to improve her bonus, is actually bad for the company.

When it's all done, they will claim it's saving us $N million dollars per year, even though it was actually a costly mistake. How do I know this? Because the same thing happened less than two years ago.

Add comedic and artistic skill, and voila, a Dilbert strip. Maybe two or three.

mrj• 16 years ago

As far as I can tell, being a big company manager is mostly defined by dealing with internal politics and attending a lot of meetings.

joshkaufman• 16 years ago

^ This.

I worked for a Fortune 50 for six years while building my business on the side. It was interesting for the first few years, then got old fast. There are two huge problems every big company has:

1. Communication Overhead - the more people you have to work with, the percentage of time you spend communicating with others vs. getting actual work done rises geometrically until it approaches 100%. You know you're getting there when you start having meetings to prepare for other meetings.

2. Bureaucracy - managers are on the hook for other people delivering things they may not understand and don't directly control, all while dealing with massive uncertainty. That's why there's so much bureaucracy - things like Gantt charts make managers feel better by creating the illusion of certainty and control, even though they mostly make things worse by reducing flexibility and speed.

If you enjoy (and are good at) playing politics, big companies will be a good fit for you - that's what you'll spend most of your time doing every day. If you like spending most of your time creating useful things, don't work for a big company.

pasbesoin• 16 years ago

Bureaucracy boils down to risk management -- for those participating in the bureaucracy.

(I recognize and agree with what you describe. Just my spin on a nutshell perspective.)

Balsamic• 16 years ago

I've spent the past two years working for one of the monolithic IT consulting firms. Communication overhead is something anyone attempting to understand enterprise software needs to grasp. Omnipresent meetings occur as an individual's defence mechanism. It is a mischaracterisation to treat it as a problem divorced from corporate structure, as they really are two sides to one coin.

Holding a meeting keeps a paper trail of your attempts to solve a problem and dilutes responsibility across all those involved. Hence, despite the fact that all participants likely sit within ten metres of each other a meeting will still be scheduled: complete with calendar invites, hour-length time blocks (as less would not look like the issue is being given sufficient credence) and the scheduling of follow-up meetings.

Additionally, enterprise projects do not consist of harmonious teams. Each team is akin to a project of its own: each with its own corporate structure, politics, budgets, risks and resources. I recently had a manager from one team demand I attend dual hour-long meetings per day for her team. I politely declined, stating that to do so my team would require an additional resource to cover this gap. This did not ingratiate me.

dirtyaura2• 16 years ago

My point was to explore more about what big company management and leadership should be, not Dilbertsque rendition of non-working work environments.

How would you organize e.g. Google to prevent it from growing to politics driven company like Microsoft seems to be (based on the recent Kin stories)? Or is it inevitable that big human organizations become these inefficient borgs after a certain size?

tomjen3• 16 years ago

It is inevitable, as soon as you start brining in business people, since they are capable (and therefore will) start to play political games. It is simply the order of things.

If you keep the company limited to producers (engineers, doctors, scientiests, etc) and kick out anybody who isn't producing (in the event that somebody took the job to make a paycheck, rather than because they like to produce), and you should be fine.

rbanffy• 16 years ago

The real question is not how, but why?

dirtyaura2• 16 years ago

Headline was a tongue-in-cheek. If you read between the lines, I'm a co-founder in a small startup with two guys, and I've no intentions to become a bigco manager. Unless our company grows to >1000 employees (unlikely) and I for some reason want to stay in the helm (as unlikely).

However, as an armchair sociologist (aren't we all? ;-)) I think it's still very interesting to study how bigcos are organized, and is there solutions to growing pains once you go past a few thousand employees.

I personally believe that in the end of the day, you need to have quite similar skill set to run a startup with 50 employees as you need to run a company with 5000 employees. It's about leadership and inspiration, understanding the problems in all levels of work.

How to learn to be a big company manager?

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