The backlash against running firms like progressive schools has begun
economist.comI don't... like the author of this piece. He writes like he doesn't really understand what he is discussing.
For instance, he conflates the move to open plan offices, which is seen as increasing communication within teams, but also enables an almost oppressive level of employee monitoring, with googles propensity to space hoppers. These are quite different things, coming from quite different places. Open plan offices have very little to do with happy employees, and everything to do with productivity.
I detect a subtext when he says 'hierarchical is better, managers should think about strategy, Blackberry CEOs are a professional manager and a technician (which is a loaded word, as it means a low skilled technical worker).
I mean, is this a backlash against the increasingly irrelevance of management in flat organizations? If we read an article by an IT worker, explaining that Amazon Cloud might be making him irrelevant, but companies migrating to it are making a huge mistake, then we would see his true motivations in writing that. I wonder if computer enabled flat management is making people like Schumpeter feel under threat.
The idea of risks and experimentation, is that companies like Google are not creating products through a predictable process - they are farming black swans.
You can manufacture software to spec predictably. If you can find developers who will work to spec, remain motivated without personal control of their work, and generally put up with being treated like a production line worker, you can make software on a production line. Infosys do just this.
But you can't manufacture technological progress, the next big thing. Because the creation, validation, and creative implementation of ideas is not something that comes out of a factory. Sony try this. Look where that gets them.
I reject the implications of the dichotomy of command based and montessori based management structures, but I also think you're shrugging off some important negativities that come from open offices and flat structures. (I also really wish people would stop making statements like "they are farming black swans" when talking about these big tech companies. If black swans were farmable there would be no significance to the black swan).
Where I think the article has a good point: - These open offices are incredibly distracting, and it's not just sound, it's not a problem that can be mitigated by putting headphones on alone. In the open office at my workplace, I can see people moving; I can see who's going to meetings; I can see who's talking across the room. I think of this distraction, to use a popular new term, as a dark pattern to productivity.
I'd like to call B.S. on those who think great, creative new products come from chattering with your peers rather than working really hard. Ideas are the cheap and easy part, it's the execution that decides whether they come to fruition or not.
To me the big point about innovation, that I think you touched on and the article is wrong about, is these great ideas only happen when employees have the freedom to work hard on a side project. This is more likely to happen in a flat company, but can happen in a hierarchical one as well. Employees need to know that they can work hard on a gamble side project, and if it turns out well, will also have the freedom to integrate it with the company's product(s). That's where innovation comes from, and an open style office only slows down the work required to make an idea into a real product, and a hierarchically structured company is more likely to not allow such freedom.
"If black swans were farmable there would be no significance to the black swan" - this statement does not make sense to me. It seems reasonable to think that they are both significant and can also be sought after more effectively than through random chance. If you mean to imply that if it were possible, it would be happening already then I would just say the experiments need to run another decade before we'll have good data.
Taleb's "black swan" is by definition not a repeatable -- or even predictable -- event. The metaphor loses all novel meaning if stripped of that quality.
For reference the definition is, "an unpredictable or unforeseen event, typically one with extreme consequences." Let's take truly great works of art as an analog to black swans. I agree you cannot create a formula for churning out more great art, as one struck in a certain direction reduces the greatness and significance of others in that direction. But if some wealthy patron collected a bulk of the worlds great artists, giving them creative freedom, tools and space... I cannot say for sure it would result in more "great art" than would be produced otherwise. But I would not say it's impossible by definition, as you do.
Hear hear, re. open offices. Sometimes, one just wants quiet - not music, not chatter, not white noise. Not to mention the long-term hearing damage that comes as a result of being forced to listen to loud music to drown out the irrelevant chatter when you are just trying to write some code. Sad days.
>is making people like Schumpeter feel under threat
Schumpeter won't care, he's been dead 60+ years now. The Economist has a habit of naming their departments after famous people in the field to make a political statement. Schumpeter was kind of the anti-Marx and anti-Keynes of his era. Read into that what you may about the editorial board of the Economist. Somehow I don't think Fox is in any danger of having their "fair and balanced" motto stolen by the Economist LOL
He had his good points and his bad points as an economist. They're probably not all over his biorhythm / astrology based business cycles, although given how crude understanding was at the time, he did push the field forward at least a little. On the other hand he was kind of the first wise old men of technological innovation and the entrepreneurs so on HN of all places I would expect people to at least pretend to have heard of him. I would expect this crowd would not give a pass on someone who had no idea who Turing or Babbage was, so its kinda a bad scene that I seem to be the only person on HN who knows who Schumpeter was.
As for the specific claim about management being replaced, he was of the opinion that in groups people cannot self govern themselves successfully, and they pretty much need a loosely controlled republic at most, not referendums and democracy. So not knowing much about his views on management, but knowing his views on govt, he'd probably find that tool-mediated management is not going to work any better than mass media-mediated government. But who knows, someone who knows more econ than me, might dredge up an essay by the man on this very specific topic.
Thanks. I stand by case, addressed at the author not Schumpeter. But feel rather silly.
Most Economist pieces are written by try-hard underpaid 20-somethings desperate to be taken seriously.
Keeping that in mind helps to contextualize nonsense like this.
It's also why the Economist operates the way they do.
Oh boy, are you right. I have an Economist subscription which I got after foolishly assuming that the quality of Charlemagne and Bagehot are representative of the whole product.
What enrages me most is that the "leader" opinion pieces (at the very front of every issue) are so catastrophically bad. I recently wondered if there might be a positive correlation between how bad a political decision has played out and whether or not it had been demanded by "leader".
As soon as it runs out, I'll get a Guardian subscription instead.
I too had an Economist subscription (thankfully due to airline points) which I did not renew. Sometimes, it felt like Fox News with an English accent. It was always a good read but the monolithic "insight" started to rankle after a while. Also, I sometimes read a given magazine many months after I received it - it was fun to compare reality vs. what was predicted in the magazine.
I know what you mean, but its all in the interpretation. "Here's the most important PR spin we can present at this time." They usually make the right decision about it being the most important PR message. Being important, influential or loud seems to have little bearing on if the spin is actually correct or not.
Whats on the inside front cover of Make Magazine? That means its probably worth talking about; doesn't mean its necessarily the right thing for everyone to buy all the time.
Look on the bright side, at least the Economist isn't as bad as getting your biz/econ news from CNBC; as a legacy media its pretty good.
In any case, open plan offices are less about happiness or productivity and more about saving money and accommodating high headcount growth, with some rationalization about communication after the fact.
You talk about technological progress and innovation as something contradictory to any sort of predictable process iterating on an existing product.
This isn't always the case. A lot of new innovating ideas are incorporated into existing systems and products. Whether something stands alone by itself or not is a packaging question- not a judge of how innovating something new is. A key new feature in a complex system can solve large long-standing limitations and have huge impact.
Rather than only working on new interesting ideas as side projects, you can incorporate time to experiment with new ideas during a shipping cycle. Prototypes and answer a lot of questions in a short amount of time, and those answers can be incorporated into planning for new features.
Predictable process doesn't have to stifle innovation- and can create a forum for new innovating ideas to be discussed and executed on well.
Yes I bet the author came from the German system where if your pigeonholed at 14 or so as a "technician" level at school your social mobility is very restricted.
The author is describing an office culture that is completely unconnected to actual Montessori schooling under Montessori methods.
Montessori actively encourages children to develop the capacity to disagree reasonably within teams while preserving civility. The classroom environment and curriculum encourages solitary inquiry into subjects of great personal interest. Providing quiet spaces for individual students to carry out work is a high priority in Montessori classrooms. And, in marked contrast to a hierarchical, command-and-control style education, Montessori allows a student to choose to spend hours of the school day away from the noise and bustle of the classroom and their peers working on his/her project.
Aside from considering what Montessori "actually" is, the whole premise is blown by one fact: traditional, hierarchical education systems put students in the classroom, a completely open, depersonalized space that explicitly encourages surveillance and strips away individual privacy. So, tell me again, what does the model for open-space offices most closely resemble?
I've read some excellent critiques of open-plan, non-hierarchical office culture and management styles; this was not one.
We're open plan at Blekko and it has its plusses and minuses. Rich (our CEO) had the experience of taking an open plan group to a mix of offices and open plan that went very badly as communication dried up. At Google quad cubes were the norm, doubles were the minimum (even for VPs who in theory would need to be talking at times about material things).
The benefit is it is easier to communicate, and the downside is that it is harder to get away. We give everyone a pair of noise cancelling headphones as a way of shutting out the office noise. Its not as solid as an office but its better than nothing, and culturally if you're typing away with your headphones on its very similar to working with your door closed.
That said I don't think it is the ultimate answer, there is still stuff to be done. Maybe rolling desks around so you can move them into an office when you need to concentrate? Or perhaps some partitions for groups but not cubicals explicitly.
Definitely a work in progress.
"We give everyone a pair of noise cancelling headphones as a way of shutting out the office noise."
Can't you just rent a 1950s vintage office building somewhere cheap and give your people the option? C.F. Claude Shannon (who stayed in a city centre building when his employer moved to the suburbs)[1].
I agree with others that the OA is confusing several issues (office layout and corporate goofiness).
Options are key. I love headphones. I've spent more money on headphones than most[0], but a lot of the time when I'm working on some types of problems, I don't want to listen to anything and I don't want distractions or anything sitting on my head. Not everyone works well with headphones, so it is reasonable that there should be places you can get away to. Lacking a space like that, you oftentimes seek out a third place like a coffeeshop that may not be quiet but at least doesn't have chatter of immediate relevance to you.
I really wonder if we've lost something by not having more spaces in our life like libraries where the cultural norm is to be silent and to enforce silence in the space so it may remain a sanctuary from noise.
[0] ironically, I've also made more as the models I bought appreciated in value significantly, so yay!
can you elaborate on the types of headphones that appreciate in value?
Discontinued headphones that had great sonic characteristics, coupled with a lot of growth in the high-end headphone market.
The two that I owned were:
-- Joe Grado HP-1000 HP-1 (bought@ $700 , sold@ $1700)
-- AKG K-1000 (bought@ $750, sold@ $1250)
Both were amazing headphones. I especially loved the experience with the K-1000, but I never used them enough to justify them because I amped them with a pair of monoblock power amps which were normally connected to floorstanding speakers. The effort to change the cables coupled with the risk of burning out components if you wired something up loosely and one power amp was driven with no load lead me to rarely switch the floorstanders for the K-1000s.
Now I use a Denon D7000, which surprisingly works great unamped, but I'll be getting an amp in a few months probably.
The kind that are stapled to bearer bonds?
Can you describe in more detail what went wrong with the mix of offices and open-plan? That always seemed to me like the obvious compromise: an office for when you want to get away, and shared open space when you want to work together. Were the problems fixable without going fully open-plan?
For me, headphones would help but wouldn't be enough. I hate having people moving around behind me. I could have my back to a wall, but there's still a potential problem of visual distraction. I haven't had the chance to try that, but next time I'm in an open plan I'll ask for a back-to-the-wall seat.
I wasn't there so I'm not comfortable relating the specifics, his comments about it indicated that people who had offices sort of disconnected from the rest of the population.
Can you say more about the challenges of people moving behind you? I felt similarly but it had more to do with whether or not people would correctly interpret what I was doing / not doing. So for example I'll read something from a different subject to pull my brain out of an endless loop when I am not making progress on a problem. Is that goofing off? Sure it might look that way if you didn't ask but if you did ask you would get the full story. So can people own up to asking? Or do they run with their assumptions?
As a manager I like to know that folks are making progress against the things they are responsible for. Sometimes they have milestones, sometimes not, so I spend some time trying to understand that progress. If there is little progress and a lot of web surfing, that is a useful conversation to have (trying to be more productive). But if someone is spending their days checking in excellent code and leaves TMZ up on their monitor I'm totally fine with that too. It reminds me of an anecdote.
So my daughters had this tendency to do their homework in front of the television. At first glance it looked like more "TV watching" than "studying" and the conversation we had was about results vs consequences. I didn't care one way or the other if they spent time watching television, as long as the priority was to get their work done. The consequences of not getting that work done occurred whether I approved or didn't approve. But I was also quite clear that it was their choice and so there aren't any excuses for poor work if it is done while watching TV, its just the indicator that you can't really do both and expect to do good work. Conversely if you do both and your work is fine, then that is totally fine.
If I can develop a level of trust with someone that they realize what I care about is that they get done what they say they will (and that getting done both a reasonable amount of work and at good quality levels) then they also understand I have no issue with them apparently "goofing off."
My dislike of people moving behind me stems more from instincts related to physical security than fear of people seeing what's on my screen (though that's there too). Rationally, I know I'm as safe at work as anywhere, but then I try not to take security for granted anywhere else either. I'm not sure if I'm paranoid or everyone else is too optimistic. It's not a huge issue. At one internship my back was to a minor thoroughfare and I managed to be productive; it was just a minor discomfort.
If some people had offices and others didn't, I can totally see how that would cause issues. In my ideal scenario everyone has some hidey-hole, at least. Do you think that would work better, as long as there are other ways they are encouraged to communicate?
But you don't need an open plan to know if people are making progress, right? Or the ability to know what's displaying on their monitor?
Having worked in a variety layouts, I'd say the small team room setup is among the best. It's open layout within the team room, but the team gets their own room, sets their own culture etc. The lead for the team is the interface into the room. When the team is heads down on work it'll get quiet, and the room doubles as a conference room saving floor space. The only hard part is sizing the rooms and teams appropriately so you don't end up with stragglers sitting away from the team -- they'll never ever integrate into the team.
Open floor plans with offices are among the most caustic I've ever encountered as everybody jostles and resents those that get offices. Inevitably some criteria for office assignment will get set and then you'll run out of offices and some various persons who've worked long and hard to "earn" an office won't be able to get one and now you have a senior disgruntled bad apple in among your rank and file.
Open floor plans are terrible too, but a step down from open with offices. They often backfire in weird ways as well. In one place I worked the dev area was an open office with breakout conference rooms. The unwritten culture was that it had to be as quiet as a tomb. Which also meant there was no communication happening...so it was pointless as a communication mixer. People stopped checking their email and communication deadlocked.
Wait, why did people stop checking email? I don't see how that relates to the open plan office. I've worked in open-plan offices and team rooms before, and people were generally pretty responsive on email and IM.
Like I said, it can backfire in weird ways. I think it happened because the silence rule made people stop verbal communications, which is the most natural thing in an open office, and it never switched to using email because well...it seems weird to email somebody who's right there. So email clients stayed closed and the communications culture just generally shut down.
Odd. Everywhere I've been with an open office, it's perfectly normal to use electronic chat with someone who's next to you. I guess you would want to make that part of the culture early on, to make it less awkward.
> and culturally if you're typing away with your headphones on its very similar to working with your door closed.
True. But, as with all things that have pros and cons, if your culture doesn't respect that you have headphones on it's not at all like working with your door closed. There is no barrier to a tap on your desk or shoulder with 'a quick question.' This happens quite often where I work and I find myself guilty of doing it as often as it is done to me. Speaking for myself, a cultural barrier is much less inclined to stop my behavior than a real physical barrier be it a cube with walls or even better an office witha door.
I have worked in a variety of situations the past 10+ years some cubes, once I had an office to myself and open floor plans the past several years. I think my optimal preference would be the shared office approach, with 2 or three individuals in the office. In a small group, it's much easier to request and establish a smaller customized set of things related to mutual respect for differences in how we all work.
Some choice quotes from this:
"It is rather absurd for a technology firm to provide slides for staff to play on, and to let them wear silly propeller-hats"
"Time was when firms modelled themselves on the armed forces, with officers (who thought about strategy) and chains of command"
It always amuses me to read these lofty articles from academics and journalists about how multi-billion-dollar companies are doing it wrong.
>>It always amuses me to read these lofty articles from academics and journalists about how multi-billion-dollar companies are doing it wrong.
What are you trying to say here? Are you suggesting that if someone has a multi-billion dollars company, they are clearly "doing it right?"
Disclaimer: I work at Google, and note that I'm explicitly NOT saying "Google is doing everything right".
I'm trying to say that Google in particular is "doing it right" in the sense that they're providing a fun environment for existing engineers and one that's attractive to many potential engineers, and that the revenue numbers reflect this (in part).
I'm saying that calling propeller hats "silly" (they're a Noogler thing; silly is the point) and bemoaning the fact that Google doesn't "model themselves on the armed forces" (whatever that means) suggests to me that these journalists and academics have no idea how things work in the real world, or at least in the Valley.
Well, they're doing something right...
Yes, but it's possible to get to a billion dollars getting some things right and others wrong. There's almost always something to improve.
Assumes facts not in evidence.
I think what we're doing here is confusing a particular model with all things new. Yes, no doubt Montessori had a big impact back in the day -- it's still being felt now. But I doubt that this explains all of the changes we're seeing. More likely is that things that seem to work are copied.
Models are always faulty in some way, but using them appropriately can be a good thing. The problem many of these corporate styles addresses is that it's very easy to overconstrain your solution space without realizing it. This turns out to be extremely important in creative tasks. Not so much everywhere, but in places where teams are supposed to be both creating and radically optimizing their work streams? Makes a huge difference.
We're also seeing the emergence of a personal corporate brand, where companies are supposed to have personalities, like people. Employees are encouraged to get Twitter accounts. Everything that faces the public is supposed to look like "Hey! We're having a blast here, and we can't wait to help you out." The majority of the corporate submarine pieces we see on HN have this subtext.
These are major changes. Perhaps you can lay it all at the door of the Montessori style, but I kinda doubt it. Instead, I think the author is just making a blanket assertion, creating a bit of a straw man in order to set it on fire. As long as it encourages critical thinking about these things, that's not a bad thing.
> Both companies have pragmatically mixed progressive ideas with more traditional ones such as encouraging internal competition and measuring performance.
Apparently the author and his editors failed to notice that he has already disassembled his straw man before he starts attacking it...
It seems like the author is mixing the idea of an open floor workspace with a casual atmosphere at work.
I'll be the first to rail against a lot of contemporary Silicon Valley/tech culture, but running your business like 1950s IBM has nothing to do with producing a quality software/hardware product. If you don't have a public facing job, then does it matter if you wear a t-shirt and jeans to work, and have video games in the break room, etc?
"Time was when firms modelled themselves on the armed forces, with officers (who thought about strategy) and chains of command. Now many model themselves on learning-through-play “Montessori” schools."--What do you bet that the author of this piece has never served in the military?
If you don't have a public facing job, then does it matter if you wear a t-shirt and jeans to work
I think it can. I've had a couple of jobs where I needed to wear a suit to work (or at minimum, dress shirt, tie, and slacks) even though my job was not customer-facing. It had its annoyances but in some ways I think I took everything a little bit more seriously when I was at the office. Probably for the same reasons that uniforms are found to decrease behavior problems in schools that require them. There's sort of a mental switch that is thrown when you put on your suit, you switch into "work mode" and then when you take it off at the end of the day you switch to "not at work mode" and it actually can help with work/life balancing.
What works for you doesn't necessarily work for everybody. For example I am completely unable to work from home, so even though most of my career I worked remotely, I prefer to rent an office, even when I have the freedom to stay home.
But not all people have such preferences. I know people that are quite happy and productive while working from home. And personally I come to work in slippers and tee-shirt during the summer, with no effect on my seriousness with which I treat work.
A big part of uniforms is so kids (mostly girls) don't play clothing status oneupmaniship bullying on each other.
Well I worked for a large phone company and at an evening event a few years ago a retired older guy > 85 commented that he joined at 14! as a telegraph boy and every morning they had to line up for inspection.
I think this is an interesting idea to discuss, but the article is confusing to the point of being misleading.
Specifically, the first half of the article is about "Montessory-style" business leadership. The second half cites a survey or two that criticize excessive collaboration within teams and open-plan office layouts.
It seems intended to mislead the reader into conflating these two criticisms of very specific issues with criticisms of the entire so-called "Montessory-style" business approach. But I don't think the article contains any actual evidence of the backlash claimed in the title.
> "Morten Hansen of the University of California, Berkeley studied 182 teams who were trying to win a contract on behalf of a professional-services firm. He found that the more time they spent consulting others, the less likely they were to win a deal. This shows, he says, that collaboration has costs as well as benefits."
This quote is everything that's wrong with science journalism. I'm sure there are some narrowly defined conclusions to be drawn from the study, but "collaboration had costs as well as benefits" is a truism, not a finding.
And I'm highly skeptical that Hansen said any such thing (that the results somehow say something new about the scale of costs relative I benefits of collaboration). Though if he did he and his reviewers bear some responsibility.
I agree about the open-plan thing, but for the rest, doesn't it just depend on the kind of work being done? The author mentions a study about how collaboration hurt deal-making, but that's a totally different endeavor than programming.
This always happens on these "it depends" questions. People see one thing that works and try it everywhere. Then people see that it doesn't work everywhere, and just assume it's bad. This author fell neatly into the trap.
My (non-tech) workplace has individual offices for the engineers. Every engineer, even fresh grads, gets an office with a door (though windows are reserved for the senior guys). It sounds like a privilege at first, but with our lack of email it's pretty isolating. We can always get up and walk to each other to talk one-on-one, but sometimes I miss the collegial feel of 3-4 people hashing things out while at their desks.
> Every engineer, even fresh grads, gets an office with a door (though windows are reserved for the senior guys).
What?! An office of the size for 1 person, without a window? That sounds awful. Is it like a big closet with bright-lighting?[1] How many people on HN would like to work in the room pictured in the below link?:
http://jonnyh.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/kar-server-room-pa...
Not everyone has the same preferences. I'd definitely prefer a one-person office without a window to any open office space.
The room in your photo would look a lot better to me just by replacing the overhead fluorescent lighting with some incandescent lamps and putting some art on the walls.
Well it seems to me that backlash against Montessori management is Montessorian in nature since no where in the article does the author imply an extreme negative pull. You know, the phrase, "Anti-Montessori management on the upsurge". Where is it? You can't be midway off midway.
Ah, just ignore me if I don't make sense .Kumbayah!(that's right just one Y)
The authors views remind me of The Onion's editorial cartoons.
Well with a name like "Schumpeter" you can tell he's pining for the ultra structured German style where the end game is to get an office with a brass plate with Her Doktor on it.
Actually, the pen-name is probably a reference to Joseph Schumpeter[1], who was an influential Austrian economist.
The prosecution rests Milud