Many of us work in large corporate environments. Much like everything else in life that humans are involved in, human nature shows through in every aspect, both the good and the bad, the way that things grow and develop and sometimes fall apart. I won't bother going into great detail about this, many people more educated than I have spent their entire lives documenting just small attributes of human nature and there are several sciences dedicated to this topic including anthropology and psychology. Religion attempts to concern itself with this topic as well, but in a different way. What I want to focus on is not human nature though, but "corporate nature", or the way an entity created by people behaves and when it is appropriate - or even necessary - for that entity to stop behaving like the people who created it.
I'll start on one small aspect of this and attempt to put all my thoughts down over time. I was speaking to a colleague the other day about how companies form. In the entrepreneurial sense there is an idea, then people, then more people, then a product, more people, etc. The developer of the idea becomes the purveyor of the product and along the way requires more and more manpower to meet the growing demand of the market (hopefully!). It seems to be a sign of success of the founders of small, start-up companies to talk about the number of people they employ and, especially in recent times, we've seen the government bend over backwards to protect the companies that do employ the most people. However, in any employment pool there is a ratio of "Employees" to "Dead Weight". Or, to change that a bit and put that same concept in a more positive light, "Number of Employees" to "Number of Effective Employees". The relationship of these numbers tends to be that as the number of employees climbs, the number of effective employees does not. A one man show run by an entrepreneur may represent a 1:1 relationship. If he hires a really kick-ass accountant and an amazing front-end developer, perhaps the relationship stays 1:1. But as the company grows and grows and grows and eventually has their own service desk, system administrators, a flotilla of software engineers, etc, that relationship changes drastically. It's been my observation that generally most departments have one really bright superstar that tends to pull the majority of the weight. Sometimes slight more but the relationship is never even close to 1:1 in a large enterprise.
So... clearly any enterprise wants to keep this relationship as close to 1:1 as possible. But how? As companies grow they need more people, right? And amazing talent isn't always easy to find. This is where the Inversion Principle (a term coined by a friend of mine. Or at least introduced to me by a friend of mine in this particular context; Google turned up nothing) comes into play. The concept is that as a company gets larger and more flush with cash (or greater access to credit) and more mature in its product offering it becomes easier to outsource commodity services (i.e. systems administration, call center tasks, etc) and the enterprise has more money for commercially available business process management software whereby less development is needed for commodity software (i.e. reinventing the proverbial wheel; work flows, routing software, etc). This allows the enterprise to become larger with less. Of course, this is antithetical in some ways to basic aspects of human nature. Additionally, we often have a notion of "if it ain't broke don't fix it" because this is the way companies have run since Adam Smith and the industrial revolution. But look where this has taken the auto industry. And there is no reason to believe that other companies won't go right down that same path. IT is like the auto union workers for the 21st century company. It's helpful but it is also a tremendous liability of not managed appropriately.
I'll be writing more about how companies, departments or even small work groups can begin to take advantage of the inversion principle in daily practice in order to reduce their size and increase their effectiveness. It may seem strange, but less truly is more.
