I flew out from Boston to Denver this afternoon for a ten-day visit to StorageTek. I have an unusual role in all of this, with one foot in engineering and the other in human resources. My main objective is to facilitate the smooth integration of the Sun and StorageTek engineering communities. Now as you’d expect there are groups busily working on what the merged organization structure should look like, who reports to whom, and what the engineering deliverables are; similarly there are HR teams mapping job grades and benefits and stuff like that. I’m not trying to duplicate their efforts. My focus (colleagues might call it a long-standing obsession) is on connecting the engineering community: bringing together creative engineers who might otherwise be isolated in “stove-pipe” organizations, fostering the kind of conversations that create new opportunities. For me, the person who put it best was Lou Gerstner of IBM. Here’s an excerpt from an interview with BusinessWeek about his book Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?
Q: In the book, you use the phrase “counter-intuitive corporation.” What do you mean?
A: There is this view that has been prevalent for as long as I’ve been in the business world that large companies are slow, ineffective, and that small companies are faster, better, more entrepreneurial. I don’t buy into that. It’s harder to make large companies faster, entrepreneurial, more responsive. But it doesn’t mean they can’t be that way.
This is probably the subject of another management book, but this is all about creating organizations where knowledge moves in a different way than control. Large companies have to have elaborate systems of control because there’s lots of things to count, oversee, report, and add up. You create this kind of skeleton of an organization, which keeps it upright and moving. But you don’t want knowledge, which is what people really leverage in a large institution, moving along the same pathways as control.
You’ve got to free knowledge so that it moves horizontally in an organization, not hierarchically, and allows organizations to leverage the fact that they have a big presence in various markets so they know things. That knowledge can move across the enterprise. Smaller companies have no way to leverage information.
So that’s what I’m up to, in a variety of ways: fostering the horizontal flow of information. To me, that’s what makes the difference between a bunch of engineering teams and an engineering community. And we’re not just talking about product development: this has to include research, development, manufacturing, pre-sales, consulting, and support. More anon.