Pride in the Esoteric – A Problem of Scale

You’ve failed to scale your business because:

• You have not standardized typical deliverables
•  Everyone who joins your company must learn by asking the same questions their predecessors have
•  Everyone who wants to accomplish an established task must learn to solve it on their own
•  Everyone else in the company must train your staff
• “Solve it once, and document it forever” is not an operating motto
• You promote based on who knows the system/platform the best, not who contribute to scaling the org and disseminating knowledge
• All the new people are not respected because they ‘don’t know what it took to get there’

The above are some of the symptoms I see in my current company; there is a distinct hatred of standardization and an almost godlike view of individuals who monopolize knowledge of processes and systems. From working at Google and other startups who live 6sig culture, this obviously irritates me. The company has put its back against the wall in its ability to service clients, longer hours and burn out is SOP. In advising them on how to improve their process, I was met with ultimate freak out on not valuing and embracing ‘ambiguity’.. asking ‘why not clarify ambiguity once so everyone doesn’t have to solve it repeatedly?’, believe it or not, got escalated.