Steven Sinofsky

Business is a social science which leads to lots of crazy advice that arises from doing whatever seems to be working at a given moment for a visible and successful company. […] Conversely, if something isn’t going well then it won’t be long before the collective wisdom concludes that you need to go with the other end-point of the pendulum.

Steven Sinofsky

If there is one thing that consistently amazes me it is that org changes are made without clearly and deliberately identifying what problems will get solved by the new structure, new leaders, and new resource allocation. In fact, most every org change I ever saw that didn’t work started off not with a problem statement but with a goal of putting a certain person in … [ Read more ]

Steven Sinofsky

When you create an org chart you are creating your product — the seams in the org get reflected in the product; the depth of feature work gets reflected in resource allocation; the coordination across job functions gets reflected by the leaders you choose, and so on.

Steven Sinofsky

In practice, there are few hard and fast facts that govern the sociology of organizations. I would go as far as to say that anything can be made to work for any structure. In fact, since there is no optimal or perfect organizational structure (if there was, then this post would be unnecessary) then the most important thing is to know the weaknesses of your … [ Read more ]

Steven Sinofsky

As was well-documented back around 2006, things had not been going well in developing the next release of Windows and so naturally one might ask if the organization caused the problem, if there was just a leadership/management problem, or the problem was in some process that could be addressed. That is always the issue with an org-centric view of execution problems. Is it the physical … [ Read more ]

Steven Sinofsky

[Mike Maples] spent many years watching people fight to move expenses to other teams, claim revenue for their own team, or even fight against the price of shared corporate services. This “allocation” dynamic is extreme “finance gymnastics” that grows exponentially complex as the business cross-dependencies grow. Ultimately the meaning of P&Ls derived from allocations becomes the undoing of most rational thought in an organization — hiring, investing, … [ Read more ]

Steven Sinofsky

Going back to the history of accounting, a P&L is a tool used by executives to inform decisions around resource and capital allocation, pricing, etc. In a large organization, it is very difficult to assign revenue and costs to a specific unit within a company and even more difficult to offer true span of control or accountability to a unit leader. The creation of P&Ls … [ Read more ]

Steven Sinofsky

By far the biggest failure risk of a unit org is that the unit is created to solve a problem rather than create a business. While problems deserve attention, the unit structure implies much more than a technology or GTM problem but a focus on all 4 P’s of bringing something to market. Invariably, a unit that is a problem will struggle to “define itself” … [ Read more ]

Steven Sinofsky

If the organization feels that to get something done right/well requires a manager to force people to do so, then the problems are much larger than can be solved by the org structure.

Steven Sinofsky

Tools are often successful because of the culture that implemented the tool, not because of the culture the tool created. […] The key to introducing a new tool is looking at what is being abandoned in tools and processes, not what is being added.

Functional versus Unit Organizations

Company organization structure defines both how and what a company builds. It is also one of the few decisions that a CEO can clearly make. Because organization (org) structures appear to be easily distilled down to simple graphs, it is frequently the case that when a company is doing well a given org structure serves as a model for others to follow; and when things … [ Read more ]

Use (and Misuse) of Business Case Studies

I am a huge fan of learning through cases, but I’ve also seen a lot of mis-learning through cases. In particular, learning through the presentation of business situations and discussion in order to uncover the many competing forces within a given decision is super helpful. The unique aspect of learning by the formal case method is captured in the discussion more than in the documented … [ Read more ]