This week the Economist ran an article about bureaucratic ossification at Yahoo! that became manifest in a memo leaked by the Wall Street Journal. From the Economist:
Panic may be creeping in at the edges, to judge from a leaked memo which is being called the "Peanut Butter Manifesto", and was penned by a Yahoo! executive who once shaved the letter Y on the back of his head.
The note complains that Yahoo! has become an underperforming bureaucracy with staff sequestered in silos scarcely talking to one other. It is said to combine a lack of accountability with an aversion to risk and a do-everything strategy that is like "spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular". How are the mighty upstarts fallen!
Sounds a lot like most of the big organizations I have worked for or consulted in. There are exceptions, I'm sure. I can definitely think of organizational units within larger enterprises in which it was a joy to participate.
The Peanut Butter Manifesto summarizes the Yahoo! problem thus:
We have lost our passion to win. Far too many employees are "phoning" it in, lacking the passion and commitment to be a part of the solution. We sit idly by while -- at all levels -- employees are enabled to "hang around". Where is the accountability? ...
As a result, the employees that we really need to stay (leaders, risk-takers, innovators, passionate) become discouraged and leave. Unfortunately many who opt to stay are not the ones who will lead us through the dramatic change that is needed.
This makes me feel uneasy for two reasons. First, it sounds quite a bit like most academic health centers I know of. Second, I'm one of the ones who has opted to stay. I don't like the implications. Then again, I rebel against the judgment, even if it was self-imposed just now. I know a lot of people who have opted to stay in this kind of arcane, elaborate, medieval bureaucracy and yet are passionately committed to and very effective at what they do.
The Manifesto author offers an outline of a solution, too long to repeat here. What I can pass along are the two key principles upon which the solution rests:
Blow up the matrix. Empower a new generation and model of General Managers to be true general managers. Product, marketing, user experience & design, engineering, business development & operations all report into a small number of focused General Managers. Leave no doubt as to where accountability lies.
Kill the redundancies. Align a set of new BU's [business units] so that they are not competing against each other. Search focuses on search. Social media aligns with community and communications. No competing owners for Video, Photos, etc. And Front Page becomes Switzerland. This will be a delicate exercise -- decentralization can create inefficiencies, but I believe we can find the right balance.
Blow up the matrix: What a concept. Do we dare to try, in the world of academic health centers? How can we, unless the funding mechanisms change, whereby each faculty and staff is funded by fractions of multiple grants or contracts?
No answers here, folks. I'm just living the questions, for now.
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