Tradeoffs: org design

Are all org designs evil?  This blog post does a great job of explaining the very serious trade-offs:

The first rule of organizational design is that all organizational designs are bad. With any design, you will optimize communication among some parts of the organization at the expense of other parts. For example, if you put product management in the engineering organization, you will optimize communication between product management and engineering at the expense of communication between product management and marketing. As a result, as soon as you roll out the new organization, people will find fault with it and they will be right. Still, at some point, the monolithic design of one huge organization runs out of gas and you will need to split things into smaller sub-groups...

Your goal is to choose the least of all evils. Think of the organizational design as the communications architecture for your company. If you want people to communicate, the best way to accomplish that is to make them report to the same manager. By contrast, the further away people are in the organizational chart, the less they will communicate. The organizational design is also the architecture for how the company communicates with the outside world. For example, you might want to organize your sales force by product to maximize communication with the relevant product groups and maximize the product competency of the sales force. If you do that, then you will do so at the expense of simplicity for customers who buy multiple products and will now have to deal with multiple sales people.

Working hard

Some people work over a hundred hours a week.  Like our national budget, that's a number so large that it's hard to grasp.

These days, I have 11 hours left every weekday after preparing for, commuting to, and being at work.

On an average day, I give myself
* 7 hours for sleep (assuming I sleep the minute I hit the pillow)
* 1 hour for exercise
* 1 hour for the kids and putting them to bed.
* 2 hours for everything else: mostly talking with the wife and doing household chores, but also tv, paying bills, reading, internet, etc.

Not a huge amount of free time; as you might expect, I watch very little TV.  Still, at this rate, I work 10.5 hours a day, or 52.5 hours a week. 

I could decide to skip exercise and sleep only 6 hours, then use those 2 hours for working.  I would operate a lot less effectively, but that would get me to 62.5 hours a week.

I could decide to destroy my weekends, and pull the same schedule on both Saturdays and Sundays.  My wife would be unbelievably upset, and I wouldn't get to see my sons' baseball games or eat any meals with them or take them to the zoo.  And that would still only get me to 89.5 hours a week.

To get to 100 or 110 hours, I'd have to decide to never see my kids or wife, and let my recreation and contributions to the home disappear.


I don't do those things, so I'm not as strong in my job as I could be (though I do sometimes work longer than 10.5 hours, and sometimes a bit on the weekend).  Or, I could take those extra 50+ hours and do a whole new job, start a new company, 50 hours being the equivalent of another full-time job.  (So, don't let anyone ever tell you that they can't do what they truly want to because they have to work.  The job isn't the prob.)

But that's the choice I make.  Working hard explains 80% of the variation in results.  It's a simple rule to keep in mind when you're thinking about what you want to do and how you're going to get there.

It's easy to forget

When reading about guys like Saul Griffith -- who has had, in half the number of years, more amazing ideas than I ever will -- it's easy to forget the origins of greatness.  He lives up to his reputation as "an invention engine": factory-less eye glasses manufacturing, solar energy-collecting roads, power supplies for the One Laptop per Child project.  He seems to spin out new ideas effortlessly.

But, if you have access to the full article, you also realize (once you stop being amazed) that he works on new ideas constantly.  He devotes his life to it.  Even his kids are involved: a hybrid bicycle he made short-circuited, setting fire to the seat that his infant son had just been riding in.

In the end, he represents another example of the hard-work principle, also known as the 10,000 Hour Rule.  Most of the research today on extreme performance and super achievement comes back to the fact that the achievers put in the time, day after day.  Slate offers a nice round-up on recent books on the subject.  (Via Ben Casnocha.)

You don't have to be the greatest programmer walking the earth.  And if you decide equally balance devotion to the craft with your family and friends, hobbies, and health, that makes a ton of sense.  The point is to realize that "greatness" lies within you; how much of it you want to unlock is up to you, and involves, as the Slate article points out, some amount of negative effects.

The four parts of your life

I don't remember where I heard this metaphor, but it made a lot of sense. It highlights the personal you have to make in order to be a star at work.

Think of your life as a 4-burner stove top. Because of limited gas throughput, if you burn one very hot, the others generate less heat.

Each burner represents a part of your life that you can put your time toward: family, friends, career, and health.

You can try to be balanced, but won't be a rising star in anything. Focusing on your career could mean forgoing spending time with your kids or possibly even having any. This is why many married workers with successful careers and kids don't have many friends.

Meanwhile, lots of young single people I see, with no family to worry about, work very hard, and play very hard as well with their friends. Their health also suffers a bit, but they're young.

These days, I'll admit my job is a little easy for me. You could say I'm coasting, or at best, just peddling lightly on a flat road. But I've been able to have meaningful hours with my wife and kids daily, started making my own yogurt, healthy granola, and sourdough bread, and spent a lot more time on favorite hobbies: swimming and reading literature. Family and health have gained at the cost of career.

Eventually, I'll have to turn up the heat again on my career -- move it, as it were, off the back burner -- but for now, I've been appreciating the trade-off.

Software trade-offs: strategy under fire

You built a great product. Your software is the dominant player in the market. Yay!

New competitors appear with new features. Those features target your specific strategy, exploiting it to expose a weakness. Or, "misuse" of your service also exposes a weakness of your strategy. How do you respond?

Keep in mind that the strategy is or at least has been critical to your success. Any changes could compromise the value of your software.

Lew Moorman sees Twitter theatening Google. (Via Robert Scoble.)

Twitter is building a human powered search indexing engine. It is an engine that will build better results than any rules based index and has gotten millions of people super motivated to contribute for free every day (even though they don’t know it).

Robert also points out that Twitter and other real-time interactive sites will provide better late-breaking searches.

Meanwhile, the lack of human contact on Facebook has made it difficult to recover from scams.

Facebook confirmed Rutberg's identity theft story and says it's beefing up security in reaction to the new scam. But Rutberg isn't sure how effective the social networking company has been. His main complaint: There is no way to call the firm and sound the alarm that a crime is in progress. The company confirms it doesn’t accept phone calls.

I think Facebook's problem is the easiest to resolve: put a "I am the owner of this account, and it has been taken over" link on the site, which immediately gives you access to a live person. This phone number would also be used for people who have been locked out of their accounts illegitimately. Yes, it would cost some money, but that would be managed by limiting the calls to only identity issues: those who accounts have been blocked by hackers or Facebook.

Google can hope that greater "stickiness" among their various tools -- gmail, reader, etc. -- leads to a greater percentage of people logging in, which in turn makes it easier to track specific user's behavior and who's reading whom. This will allow them to generate searches based on personal networks. Longer term, I think some amount of loss to niche searching is inevitable. This actually creates a healthier online infrastructure for us, as users.

The key for Google is whether an exploitation could turn fatal (as Google's was for Yahoo and Excite, etc.). So far, I would say this one is not.

Software trade-offs

A couple of interesting summaries about very visible software problems.

1. Facebook algorithm to squash spam crushes real accounts. Does benefiting the vast majority justify screwing over a few outliers? Which trade-off better "serves the customer"?

2. On-line game Eve faces financial meltdown. The kicker is that, in a "Being John Malkovich" kind of irony, the real financial meltdown is causing problems for the software company that runs Eve. If money stops functioning in Eve, the game itself could suffer (who wants to be destitute in fiction as well as real life?) -- should the developers step in and fix things, as god?