« Trip to Germany: Part 2 - Bauhaus | Main | Tao of Programming »
August 09, 2005
A new Paul Graham essay
Paul Graham has posted a new essay on what business can learn from open source. It is a good essay and I agree with most of. The main points are that people work harder on stuff they like, that the traditional office environment is unproductive, and that good ideas come bottom-up more often than top-down. I agree with this. However, I disagree that a startup, or aggregation of startups, is the best way to carry out a large scale endeavor.
A corporation is in essence a bureaucracy and bureaucracies have a track record of getting large scale tasks done. However, this only happens if the bureaucracy stays focused on the task and bureaucracies have a tendency to lose focus and to spend time perpetuating themselves. A bureaucracy that focuses on a particular task and dissolves when the task is complete is very productive. It is productive even if the ideas come from the top all the time or if the organization is based in a traditional style office building. The self perpetuating aspects of the bureaucracy are what cause the problem.
So what exacerbates the self perpetuating aspects of an organization? I would agree with Paul Graham that the difficult in determining the productivity of individuals is the major factor. However bad this is for individual contributors, it is much worse for managers. If an team delivers an exceptional level of performance, how much was due to the manager? Would they have done better with another manager? How could someone tell? Managers are judged by their peers based on the size of the budget they control and the number of people under them rather than on the productivity of the members of their organization. This is what leads to self perpetuating bureaucracies: every manager in an organization is trying to grow their part. They have to: they are not good managers if they don't. Fixing that would go along way to making corporations more productive.
My objections aside though, Paul Graham's essay is, as always, worth the read.
Posted by JohnC at August 9, 2005 11:18 PM