Organizational performance – a private conversation that should have been public and is now

Fri, 28 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This is a conversation between Adam Pisoni , Stowe Boyd and me relating to a guest post I made to Brian Solis’ blog, Impatience is a Virtue – What’s Next for Social Business .

The conversation played out on email, which is ironic given that all three of us advocate “working out loud” unless confidentiality precludes it. I take the blame for emailing in the first place and hope to make up for the transgression by publishing it now. I have removed those conversational niceties that pepper emails, inserted some helpful hyperlinks and comments in square brackets by way of explaining some of the terms used and topics raised, and tweaked a few things to improve readability here.

[Photo of Adam by Intel Free Press . Photo of Stowe by Paul J Corney .]

Adam

Honestly, one of the most enlightening aspects of finally working within a real, big enterprise [Microsoft acquired Yammer in 2012] is the affect of performance management and budgets. Yammer loved to yell at our large customers to just change how they worked. That anyone at any level could affect change. But what you see inside large companies is that really good people will do all the wrong things either because they eventually feel pressured to optimize for what they are incentivised to do, or because their scope of power is too narrow to affect any change. This happens with budgets all the time. Two people in different parts of the org may have an idea that could make the company lots of money, but since the budgets were set up a year in advance, they can’t shift the money between them.

Organizational-Design on Philip Sheldrake

Organizational performance – a private conversation that should have been public and is now

Adam