
Recognizing the Breaking Points of Management Structure - dvdgrdll
http://tomtunguz.com/breaking-points-of-management/
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fallingfrog
I'd be willing to wager that tighter or more hierarchical management
structures are correlated with lower levels of engagement for the employees at
the bottom. In other words- there are two ways to get people to cooperate: to
use secrecy and threats as a lever, or to have a common myth or vision that
everyone believes in. Increasing secrecy and mistrust might be a signal that
the common vision has deteriorated. Of course it depends on the size of the
organization too. I'd like to see a study confirming or disproving that idea.

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andygcook
"When startups approach those employee counts, communication within the
company breaks down and the startup can’t effectively coordinate its people.
The telltale signs include confusion in the organization, uncoordinated
efforts across teams and frustrated employees."

Can anyone who has quickly scaled headcount at a startup elaborate on some of
the challenges in scaling communication + coordination and what you did to
solve the issues?

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bluejekyll
I don't even know what to say about this article, except that it perpetuates
this ridiculous idea that there are laborers at the bottom and people above
those laborers who know how to communicate and effectively distribute
knowledge across all other groups.

If people were computers, then what's being described is a tree of systems,
and each node in the tree has full connection to its siblings and its
children. But anyone who's designed large scale networks knows that this is
horrible for data, because it doesn't allow for failure, and creates
bottlenecks. This is why spine leaf architecture is so important.

But people are not computers. Communication is way more lossy than that. What
this article fails to point out is that you actually have multiple decision
trees in organizations, the architects and technical leads in a software
group, vs the people managers. And combining those two roles creates horrible
inefficiencies in descision making. Similarly, empowering people closest to
the problem to make decisions means that the organization is much more nimble
and increases agility.

I don't know what this article's point is, because it does help understand
what effective leadership is.

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yodon
The article is talking about the numerical scaling laws that you understand
intimately from your day job but that most people who don't think about node-
based communication structures on a daily basis are surprised by.
Specifically, the article is pointing out that the cognitive loading placed on
managers grows much faster than linearly in the number of reports.

Have you thought about how to translate spine-leaf into an organizational
design and/or what sort of organizations it might be optimal for?

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bluejekyll
I'd like to think that modern network design actually could inform
organizations, especially large ones, of better methods of communication.

The goal IMO is to increase collaboration between as many groups as possible.
Where scrum teams, or similar, are autonomous in making decisions and the
scrum masters (or managers) are responsible for inter-team communication and
collaboration, but that shouldn't be the only channel. There should be other
people from the scrum team responsible for interdisciplinary collaboration.

Basically, as an organization grows, I believe it becomes more important to
have redundant communication channels into the scrum team. Like network
design, this would be akin to have multiple uplinks from the ToR leading the
the spine.

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yodon
Has anyone found a derivation for the formula in the article? The n(n-1) terms
are clearly the cost of managing the relationships between subordinates, but
I'm not understanding the motivation for the n(2^(n-1)) term.

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analog31
>>> n(2^(n-1) + n-1); n = # of reports

The same formula could be applied to the people _above you_ in the management
structure, or the number of stakeholders in a project.

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yodon
If you mean the equation measures your boss's cognitive load, then yes. If you
mean that it measures your cognitive load resulting from the organization
above you, I don't think that's correct except in the most pathologically
dysfunctional of organizations.

As a manager looking down in the organization, you are responsible for the
relationships between your reports. As an individual looking up the
organization, you are responsible for your own relationships with people but
you aren't responsible for their relationships with others (and even in a
mildly dysfunctional organization where you need to worry about your boss's
relationship with their peers, that still only adds an O(n) term because you
only care about your boss's relationships not each of your boss's peer's
relationships).

