Comments on: Organizational scar tissue

By: Why aren’t we getting richer? The scarring tissue theory

Why aren’t we getting richer? The scarring tissue theory — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 18:46:59 +0000

[...] and has happened recently in Germany because of the reunification. However, we now have too much organizational scarring tissue. So why do we see so much innovation online? The computer industry, and more recently, the web, [...]

By: Hanlon’s razor and corporations — The Endeavour

Hanlon’s razor and corporations — The Endeavour — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 14:21:32 +0000

[...] stupidity, and malice Organizational scar tissue Stupidity scales ? [...]

By: Jan Galkowski

Jan Galkowski — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 16:01:11 +0000

I’ve actually heard this same reasoning raised to explain the preponderance of rules and laws in Torah. For example, the reason why there are so many admonitions against idol worship there can be interpreted that it was a big problem and kept reoccurring. Torah says (in “Lev Torah”) that you should “love your neighbor as yourself” once, but some 38 times tells to “remember the stranger” (”ger”) as in “Honor the stranger for you were strangers in the land of Egypt”. Similarly, stop signs get put up at an intersection when enough bodies get carted away. I personally fear that we collectively will deal with global climate change, but only when enough bodies are carted away. Alas, the success of that response assumes the climate system doesn’t contain some bifurcation we trip over first ……

By: Where the Unix philosophy breaks down — The Endeavour

Where the Unix philosophy breaks down — The Endeavour — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 03:34:38 +0000

[...] Organization scar tissue Visualizing software development effort Moore’s law and software bloat ? X [...]

By: jd long

jd long — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 18:42:47 +0000

An internal Netflix document about how they manage professional staff was leaked to the web. My fav page is number 42: “Process focus drives more talent out.”

Page 72: “As we grow, minimize rules”

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/05/other-companies-should-have-to-read-this-internal-netflix-presentation/

By: cityislander

cityislander — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 19:13:57 +0000

Unquestionably the proliferation of mundane policies leads to system paralysis, which I understand is the topic of this post. To go off on a tangent, however, the popular belief about the Maginot line leaves absent an important lesson about contempt for the business of policy:

De Gaulle was stationed in Poland when it was invaded and then wrote a book, Towards a Professional Army*, about the need for the massive and offensive use of tanks to protect France against Germany. The 90-something head of state, Petain, and the military establishment behind him, dismissed it by tradition (”dying by the sword”), although De Gaulle’s superior attitude did not help either. Ironically, in earlier times, colonel Petain had also been ridiculed for tirelessly advocating new warfare policies until he was able to prove his point on the battleground (WWI), unlike most of his peers. (*) A professional army did not become policy until the 1990s!

By: John

John — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 15:05:23 +0000

I’ve seen the “shadow IT” thing over and over. Your neighbor is exactly right. The folks who start shadow IT groups are just trying to get their job done. They don’t always know what they’re doing, but their heart is in the right place. Sometimes the guerrillas cause problems because they’re incompetent. But sometimes the guerrillas are very competent and an order of magnitude more efficient than official IT.

By: JD Long

JD Long — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 13:37:41 +0000

That reminds me of a term I learned a few years ago when explaining to my neighbor that my analytics team found our corp IT group as such an impediment to productivity that we started running our own DB servers and wikis ‘under the radar’ My neighbor said, basically, “yeah, anytime IT gets cut in personnel or lacks skill then ’shadow IT’ functions spring up when tech savvy users say ‘fuck corp policy I want to get my job done so I am going guerrilla.’ ”

Hmmm.. I need to write an article on how the presence of ’shadow IT’ or ‘guerrilla IT’ inside a company is generally indicative of an IT leadership failure.

By: John

John — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 13:17:49 +0000

I did some consulting for the federal government a few years ago. The man I was working with asked me to FedEx papers to his home because if I sent them to his office it would take a week for him to get them.

When he and I got into a discussion about government “trimming fat,” he said “Government cannot trim fat. It can only hack off limbs.” The explanation he gave was similar to your “talent death spiral” comment.

By: JD Long

JD Long — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 13:05:27 +0000

Oh this is sooo right. And at some point organizations don’t scale well and the proliferation of scar tissue policies results in the org functioning as well as Poland circa 1989.

There’s a certain antiselection with employees as well. Enough scar tissue leaves employees quite unhappy and frustrated. The highly mobile, high skilled talent will leave and leave behind only the unskilled who have no alternatives and the few skilled folks who are adverse to change. This can, if left unchecked, result in a talent death spiral.

By: Michael Nielsen » Biweekly links for 07/31/2009

Michael Nielsen » Biweekly links for 07/31/2009 — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 10:53:14 +0000

[...] Organizational scar tissue — The Endeavour [...]

By: Chris Hibbert

Chris Hibbert — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 06:30:44 +0000

I like the metaphor and your discussion. I posted a response on my blog, PanCrit. The main point was to talk about how to design an organization so that the policies can change when the circumstances change.