The concepts discussed here remind me of a book I read recently called “The Cure: Enterprise Medicine for Business”. It’s in the format of a novel, from the persectives of several different characters involved in a business that makes (unspecified) widgets, and I found it to be a page-turner. I think using a fictional example helps to make a lot of things explicit that would otherwise be kind of vague, or where the author might assume the reader knows what they’re talking about, and the first half gives some great insight into what a poorly-functioning company can look like.
The central recommendation is similar to what you describe from An Everyone Culture, except that the emphasis on radical communication doesn’t include personal stuff. The main “trick” it gives for making the whole organization work is that the top management has to buy in to the extreme-honesty company-first mentality and then continually force it on everyone else until it’s universally accepted, with special attention to discovering and removing any stubborn manager who wants to protect their own turf or play power games. It claims to be based on the famously effective management system that GE used. Having little experience of corporations myself, I can’t say whether it’s a realistic approach, but the whole thing struck me as a little too neat and tidy—if it were that easy, wouldn’t everybody be doing it already?
Having little experience of corporations myself, I can’t say whether it’s a realistic approach, but the whole thing struck me as a little too neat and tidy—if it were that easy, wouldn’t everybody be doing it already?
So the reality of implementing something like a DDO is that the path to success is very narrow and there are lots of opportunities to mess up and create something worse than the default. For example, you might try to demand radical honesty, but if you punish people when they are honest and you don’t like what they had to say, the culture will get toxic fast. Or maybe you go too far on being accepting and making people feel safe and then nothing ever gets done because no one wants to say “hey, if you keep not doing your job, we’ll go out of business”. And everyone has to be on board with being a DDO, so hiring (and firing) are an even more essential function than normal because you have to find people who not only can do the job, but are also capable of being a healthy part of the org. If you have just one person who’s not on board, even if they are an individual contributor and not managing or leading anyone, this can sour the culture and start to turn people on each other if that person is able to have a strong enough effect on others.
For this reason I think it’s also very hard, and maybe impossible, to do a conversion to a DDO unless you are willing to accept a timeline much longer than any normal business would. Building one from the ground up isn’t easy, either, but it’s definitely possible even if you haven’t done it before so long as you keep iterating, experimenting, keeping to the goal, and gently correcting when you stray.
The concepts discussed here remind me of a book I read recently called “The Cure: Enterprise Medicine for Business”. It’s in the format of a novel, from the persectives of several different characters involved in a business that makes (unspecified) widgets, and I found it to be a page-turner. I think using a fictional example helps to make a lot of things explicit that would otherwise be kind of vague, or where the author might assume the reader knows what they’re talking about, and the first half gives some great insight into what a poorly-functioning company can look like.
The central recommendation is similar to what you describe from An Everyone Culture, except that the emphasis on radical communication doesn’t include personal stuff. The main “trick” it gives for making the whole organization work is that the top management has to buy in to the extreme-honesty company-first mentality and then continually force it on everyone else until it’s universally accepted, with special attention to discovering and removing any stubborn manager who wants to protect their own turf or play power games. It claims to be based on the famously effective management system that GE used. Having little experience of corporations myself, I can’t say whether it’s a realistic approach, but the whole thing struck me as a little too neat and tidy—if it were that easy, wouldn’t everybody be doing it already?
So the reality of implementing something like a DDO is that the path to success is very narrow and there are lots of opportunities to mess up and create something worse than the default. For example, you might try to demand radical honesty, but if you punish people when they are honest and you don’t like what they had to say, the culture will get toxic fast. Or maybe you go too far on being accepting and making people feel safe and then nothing ever gets done because no one wants to say “hey, if you keep not doing your job, we’ll go out of business”. And everyone has to be on board with being a DDO, so hiring (and firing) are an even more essential function than normal because you have to find people who not only can do the job, but are also capable of being a healthy part of the org. If you have just one person who’s not on board, even if they are an individual contributor and not managing or leading anyone, this can sour the culture and start to turn people on each other if that person is able to have a strong enough effect on others.
For this reason I think it’s also very hard, and maybe impossible, to do a conversion to a DDO unless you are willing to accept a timeline much longer than any normal business would. Building one from the ground up isn’t easy, either, but it’s definitely possible even if you haven’t done it before so long as you keep iterating, experimenting, keeping to the goal, and gently correcting when you stray.