Bulldozing

A delightful post at Futurelab brings together a former Microsoft VP’s article (exposé, really) on managerial mediocrity at Microsoft with a brilliant chart on the same subject.

It’s great fun. Just as this guy is. We laugh at them to forget how much suffering they’ve caused us.
On rare occasions people bulldoze through the layers of managerial suck. Lou Gerstner did it at IBM, through sheer force of will, but few have that big a bulldozer.

Here’s the problem: the market is driven by competition, with innovation a key to success. The organization is designed for managing production – keeping the value chain under control. As Microsoft the innovator got larger, it congealed into the organizational model, and its rate of innovation tanked.

Innovation comes from the edges of an organization, not the top, and the organization that welcomes it, instead of stifling it, is the one that will grow.