Reinventing Business

Bruce Eckel
Text slides on OSCON site (sorry, images made it too big)
Blog at
Reinventing-Business.com
Main site at MindviewInc.com
Images are mine unless noted
(Original paintings are for sale)

2009

Broke my leg
Lots of sitting around & staring
Are all jobs bad, as I had concluded as a young adult?
Could there be workplaces that don’t suck?
If so, they’re rare: 50-80% of people hate their jobs.

What You Might Know About Me

New Book

These Slides

My talking points plus something interesting to look at
Slides should be readable
You’ll find other versions of presentation on the web (CERN)
An unfinished and evolving process

The Question

How can I take what I’ve learned from:
- Open Spaces Events
- Burning Man
- Company Visits
- Workshops I’ve Taken/Given
- Travel & Exploration
- Consulting Experiences
And create an organization where:
- People love to be
- It’s exceptionally creative & productive
- Everyone wants to give to and support the organization

Cognitive Science!

Helpful to know how your brain can fool you
"The mind is a machine for jumping to conclusions"
Good book: "Thinking, Fast & Slow" by Daniel Kahneman
Partly explains the state of management "science" (not)
Dunning-Kruger Effect, "unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority"
Confirmation bias & "Neural grooves"

Drive (Book by Dan Pink)

$ Carrot/Stick ⇒ more productivity …
only in menial jobs
Disincentivizes for anything even slightly creative
Since the 40s, Study after study has shown this
Managers "know" it but typically fall back to pay incentives; don’t know what else to do
We want: Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose == Happy jobs!

Happy Employees Produce More Profit

As people, we know this
As managers, we can’t seem to remember/implement it
Probably from misaligned incentives in the business structure

Science

Doesn’t actually "explain"
Only establishes causality
Never proves, only disproves

Economics

It’s true: we react to stuff
Primary conceit of economics: "We can predict & control"
Only one "law": Unintended Consequences
It’s definitely still worth studying economic behavior, to give you ideas for experiments.
Try things out, just don’t pretend it’s a real science

MBA?

Business schools are the "engineering" for economics "science"
But if the science is flawed, how can the engineering work?
Starting at 200k to learn last century’s approach
Read The Managment Myth by Matthew Stewart
(see my blog post about the book)
Most business thinking starts with Taylorism, which is based on …
well, lies.
11,000 new business books published each year (!)

A different approach

Is there a better way you could learn using that money?
Can you spend a lot less and learn a lot more?
Hack your own MBA? www.PersonalMBA.com
Networking is one oft-touted MBA advantage, but it’s limited to the people that go to that school!
Go to conferences, events, visit businesses and produce better networking!

Organizational Design Principles

See blog post of the same name
Transparency
Alignment
Prefer Goals to Controls
Improve Feedback Loop
Consistency

10% of Companies Fail Every Year

Average lifespan was 60 years, getting shorter
Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Podcast: each entrepreneur gives you the secrets
They all disagree
Ed Catmull, Pixar: "Success hides problems"

How to be Lucky

Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan, Antifragile): Take small risks that usually fail, but with a large upside
An "overnight success" often takes 7-10 years

Structure Creates Culture

Clay Shirky: Here Comes Everybody
Hierarchy is for communication
Ironically, hierarchy distorts communication
Happier as it goes up
More confident (?) as it goes down

Culture Reinforces Structure

If culture tries to change in a way that requires structural change, structure pushes back
Culture usually "just happens," not designed
Cultural/structural changes imposed from the top down don’t work
They’re usually made up by business schools or consultants
"Structure of the quarter" greatly reduces trust in leadership
Centralized control is the enemy of innovation

Hiring and Firing

One of the most challenging problems, feels like it needs to be turned on its head somehow
Cutural fit is at least as important as technical ability (Cuture Debt is expensive!)
Toxic people cause serious damage — why does it take so long to remove them?
Interviewing is one of the worst ways to discover good people, but we haven’t found a solution yet.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

(from Wikipedia)

My "Organizational Hierarchy of Needs"

Visits

First one to Zappos; they make it very easy
Subsequent ones where I know somebody or arranged by associate
Intensely educational
How can this not be an integral part of an MBA?

People Within the System Need a Way to Change It

Experiments
Add things
Modify things

Holacracy.org

One old structure ⇒ one new structure? (Seeking THE next organizational structure)
Epiphany: Each organization has a unique structure! (Seeking YOUR best organizational structure)
Holacracy: a way to evolve the structure you need.
Each person wears hats (roles and accountabilities)
Primary motivator: the tension
Tensions are addressed at (highly structured) meetings
Produce changes in the organizational document
Add new roles/accountabilities

Incubators

I’ve been visiting Hackerspaces & Coworking spaces
Group in Crested Butte wants to create an incubator
Proper alignment: "school" invests in students, only succeeds when students succeed

I Have To Question Everything

At first kind of exhausting (more comfortable to "know" things; sometimes I seek confirmation bias)
I seem to be (slowly) adapting to being in the discomfort zone
Getting what you want, or unintended consequences?
Example: Open floor plans and reshuffling (sometimes I want/need an office)
Or: Unlimited vacation time (social pressure seems to make people take LESS)
Even: Results Only Work Environment (ROWE). Do we need to start with a 4-hour foundation rather than 8?

Controlling People

Possible Occam’s Razor for evaluating organizations
Is the intent of the organization to control you? (Most last-millenium-style orgs)
Or to maximize creativity?

Links

www.Reinventing-Business.com
(Conference will be announced there)
http://www.slideshare.net/HubSpot/the-hubspot-culture-code-creating-a-company-we-love
Netflix culture deck
Valve employee handbook
(These are well-intentioned but still tend to stay somewhat within the old paradigm)

Hallway discussion afterwards

Finito

"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep." — Douglas Adams