> The strawman that giant enterprises are ignorant and ripe for disruption because of their arrogance -- the classical model of hubris -- isn't true.
I'll buy that.
I still think they are ripe for disruption because they are giant enterprises.
I can't think of any examples of big bureaucratic organizations with a settled culture transforming into something different and better. Normally they get replaced.
From what reads like a bit of a puff piece about Jack Welch [1], who became Chairman and CEO of GE in 1981:
"Under Welch, GE exited many of the traditional markets it had competed in for years, like consumer appliances and air conditioning, and entered completely new areas like medical technology, finance, television and services."
During the restructurings, Welch laid off 100,000 or so people (depending on how you count), earning him the nickname "Neutron Jack". He also instituted the policy of firing the bottom-performing 10% of managers each year [2].
The longevity of these kinds of organisations is a hint that they've survived other disruptions before.
We're engaging with more enterprises at Pivotal than we used to.
They're all different.
Some "get it" really quickly and pow, off they go. Most of our repeated Labs engagements with such customers are because they're trying to transform as quickly as possible by seeding teams all across the org.
Others enterprises need, uh, repeated examples.
Some will presumably never get it. And yeah, they'll find one day that the party is over.
But, to repeat, they're all different. Applying a single rule (enterprise slow, startup fast) to heterogenous situations is a going to pay rich returns ... but not to the venture funds.
My personal business model since around 2002 or so has been to try to join disruptive teams within established firms.
Before that I was working in early-to-middle-stage startups ( but not startups in California ).
What I've seen is that you can actually bring something to "market", and the rest of the company will do everything it can to scuttle it. "The rest of the company" is busy keeping the old fires burning. So you don't get buy-in.
I've seen people leave relatively no-risk millions on the table to scuttle these things. But the main body of the organization is able to overemphasize risk in a way that leads to scuttling.
You'd have to have somebody fighting for the thing full time. Even then, it's not enough. I also won't say it's not that the others simply do not understand what was done. and to be fair, the engineering staff weren't really up to it anyway. When you've adapted to just duct tape fixes, it's hard to embrace a real fix. This, and the people at the coal face of these "products" proved less than capable of deployment.
Bluntly, people like having a buggy product or process to charge hours to. it's less work to jigger or abandon any measurement of defect rates and appeal to nostalgia. Management likes having "engineers" actually just doing clerical work because there's then no deployment cost. And frankly, we probably got it all done too cheaply.
I'm in the process of abandoning that model and going to work directly for the customer ( not a customer of any of the firms I worked for, of course ). This is a "firm" that's going from having contractors do maintenance to taking it "organic".
To quote Walt Kelly - "We has net the enemy, and it is us."
Yes, this -- don't think that just because a big company throws words and money around that they are going to change. There can be many in middle management who either don't want change;or are too set in their ways and unwilling to learn what it takes to change ;or are simply too incompetent to change. Look at Yahoo.
I agree with you, actually. I've seen before that upper management can be shown the advantages quickly, and folks at the coal face can be shown the advantages quickly.
People in the middle, whose reckoning includes career prospects and health insurance and worrying about mortgages and where their kids will go to school, tend to lean towards the "never take a risk ever" school of thought.
And a lot of corporate cultures are built on punishment and reward, distributed veto powers and a fondness for finding a neck whenever something goes wrong.
I'll buy that.
I still think they are ripe for disruption because they are giant enterprises.
I can't think of any examples of big bureaucratic organizations with a settled culture transforming into something different and better. Normally they get replaced.