
To Grow Faster, Hit Pause - vinnyglennon
http://firstround.com/review/to-grow-faster-hit-pause-and-ask-these-questions-from-stripes-coo/
======
graycat
Okay, I read all that OP.

To me, the OP has a huge gap, so huge what it left out is more important than
all it put in.

What it left out has a name; in the academic fields of organizational behavior
and public administration, the left out part is called _goal subordination_.

The definition is an employee, often a middle manager, behaving according to
what they see as their own narrow interests even if that behavior is fairly
obviously against the interests of the company. So, such an employee
_subordinates_ , that is, gives lower priority to, the goals of the company
than to their own personal goals.

So, a common part of goal subordination is to fight with people inside the
company down the hall instead of competing with people outside the company.

So, essentially the company is in some version of internal war, civil war.
Then cliques form; people become loyal to the cliques; and the cliques fight
each other.

E.g., the OP mentioned who gets invited to meetings. Well, commonly that is
based more on cliques and goal subordination than on what was mentioned in the
OP.

One of the techniques of internal clique war is gossip, sometimes called
yentas. So, there can be lots of whispering. When a clique wants to attack a
person, the gossip can get that person accused, tried, convicted, and punished
all without the person knowing anything about it. About all the punished
person knows is that they are not invited to meetings; they are not on
distribution lists; they don't get e-mail; any e-mail they write is ignored;
routine communications are avoided; they are avoided in the offices; they are
treated as if they are well known to be helpless idiots, etc. It was all done
by gossip from cliques at war.

Beyond gossip, another technique for a clique to attack a person is for the
clique to have a team that, one person at a time, drops by the person's office
to talk. The talk is never very substantive. The person is reluctant to be
rude and throw the people out, but, net, due to the team of the clique,
there's no way the person can get any work done in their office. One approach
for the person is to look serious and busy and just to say, right away, "I
can't stop now."

Another consequence is, an employee with some really good ideas and work can,
then, be seen by everyone else as a threat and, then, attacked, by gossip,
sabotage, etc. by everyone else. The old advice that the nail that sticks up
gets beaten down is part of this. So, people deliberately avoid doing their
best work. E.g., maybe in an old piece work shop, the employee that is a high
performer and exceeds their quota and gets an award one month has their tires
slashed the next month. Much the same thing can happen without piece work.

E.g., maybe in some aspect of production and operations the company is wasting
money. So some employee sees an opportunity to save the waste and help the
company, say, works out some math (say, as in operations research), writes the
corresponding software, runs the software and demonstrates some significant
cost savings, writes a paper showing the work and the savings, distributes the
paper, develops a dozen foils, and announces a talk to explain. Suddenly he
can discover that lots of managers, especially his own, can call and say that
the meeting can't be held because they have a conflict in their schedule. It
can be the case that even the CEO can feel uncomfortable because this employee
is starting to look essential and, maybe, by threatening to leave, _hold up_
the company, be an exception to the compensation plan, etc.

Another one is, in the OP, a decision with low impact that can be reversed is
to be made at low levels. Okay. Except, lots of employees have learned that
any instance of anything that can be regarded as a mistake can be used by the
cliques, gossip, internal wars, etc. to attack and destroy the person who made
a fast decision. Maybe with two weeks more study, there was an alternative
that would have cost $10 less: Presto, bingo, the person can be accused of
wasting money. Even if the person chips in the $10 from their own billfold,
the accusation still stands. So, lots of employees just will NOT make a fast
decision. Instead, they want everything thoroughly studied, in a paper report
big enough to be a door stop, and approved by a committee of a dozen people.
More generally, such a person will do everything they can to avoid anything
like responsibility or to do anything where they could be blamed or accused of
a mistake. That's one of the main reasons companies grind to a halt and one of
the main opportunities for startups until they start doing the same thing.

One of the issues is cheating going on. E.g., maybe some part of the
operations needs copper tubing so has a big supply that gets used right along
for lots of projects. Well, at times copper tubing is expensive. So, maybe the
relevant manager has not implemented anything like inventory control over the
copper tubing. Then that manager is running a personal cash and carry midnight
copper tubing supply business. Anyone who starts to ask about anything at all
related gets threatening scowls and, thus, learns just to f'get about copper
tubing.

Or, some manager has two secretaries. One of them is busy all the time, and
that's the stated reason for the need for the other secretary. This other
secretary comes in late, leaves early, and takes long lunch hours on Tuesday
and Thursday, is not around on Friday and Monday, and avoids any scheduled
meetings on Wednesday because it ruins two weekends. She has a great figure,
gorgeous hair, 6" high heels, short skirts, and spends most of her time at her
desk reading romance novels or doing her nails. Been known to happen.

Sure, the OP has lots of nice stuff. Sure, with all that nice stuff, everyone
working effectively and cooperatively, joining hands, singing Kumbaya, sounds
good. But I suspect that the dysfunctional issues I've mention are, in
reality, more important. And when a lot of stock compensation is on the line,
the dysfunctional issues can become much more common; people can fight like
mad dogs for a little more in stock options.

One response is that the CEO can surround himself with people of long time,
unquestioned loyalty, and, then, there is a _palace guard_ that is really
running the place.

Finally the CEO may just divide the work into departments, divisions, etc.,
for each of those have some accurate enough quantitative measures of
performance, insist that the managers accomplish their performance goals, and
otherwise largely ignore the small stuff. If some manager has a secretary
doing her nails but otherwise is doing great on his performance numbers, then
great -- the CEO takes the results of the good performance to the bank or the
BoD and otherwise relaxes. Ugly situation, but so is a lot of clique internal
war, dysfunctional goal subordination, etc.

Let's see: This OP was from First Round Capital. No doubt they have some BoD
seats. Then as BoD members, they need to pay attention to goal subordination
as here. For the singing Kumbaya stuff in the OP, f'get about that.

------
saimiam
I wish I had enough karma to downvote pieces like this. There should be some
sort of heuristic that HN uses to penalize such softfocus, PR-lite type
articles about a company if they get posted multiple times a week.

~~~
jwdunne
You can't down vote a submission. You can flag it but I don't think that
should be used for distaste.

The best you can do is: don't vote, don't comment and let time do the work.

I don't think comments influence ranking but your comment will certainly give
the article more visibility. People will want to judge for themselves. Some
may disagree with you and upvote it.

This has been the way for many years and it has worked well for that length of
time.

------
gnicholas
> _" No Thanks, I Don't Want to Learn More"_

Very surprised to see First Round resort to guilt/shame when readers opt-out
of their full-screen email signup modal

Honestly, even if I wanted to sign up for this list, just seeing that button
would change my mind. And I assume many people in their target audience would
feel similarly.

Since this is on the site, I assume it "performs better" than alternative
designs. But this is probably just looking at one metric: how many people sign
up.

It overlooks the fact that a higher percentage of people who don't sign up now
think less of First Round.

