Alan Deutschman, Change or die : the three keys to change at work and in life, 2007
pp.111-115
p.111
Gore-Tex
In the late 1950s one of Douglas MacGregor's speeches about Theory Y had a strong influence on a man named Wilbert L. Gore, who went by “Bill”.
Gore was an unlikely revolutionary. Forty-five years old, he was a somewhat nerdy, quiet, humble man who lived in a small house in Newark, Delaware.
He had worked for 17 years as a chemical engineer at DuPont, but he was frustrated by the “authoritarian” nature of large companies, which he felt smothered creativity.
p.112
He realized that the car pool was the only place where people talked to one another freely without regard for the chain of command. He also observed that when there was a crisis, the company created a task force and threw out the rules. It was the only time when organizations took risks and made actual breakthroughs.
Why, he wondered, should you have to wait for a crisis?
Why not just throw out the rules anyway?
And why not do away with hierarchy and ranks and titles while you're at it?
Why not create an organization where everyone could speak freely with anyone else?
p.112
Bill and his wife, Genevieve, who was known as “Vieve”, decided to start their own company. Many of their friends thought they were foolish.
They had five children to support, including two who were in college, and Bill was up for a big promotion to DuPont.
But they were motivated by creativity and achievement, not by security.
On January 1, 1958 ── their 23rd wedding anniversary ── they had dinner at home, and then Vieve said, “well, let's clear up the dishes and get to work.”
And that's how W. L. Gore & Associates was founded.
They mortgaged their house, withdrew four thousand dollars out of their saving, and raised extra capital from their bridge club.
Their first few coworkers lived in their basement, accepting room and board instead of salaries.
It's a classic story of an entrepreneurial venture in every way except one: Even as W. L. Gore grew tremendously over the years, and even as it created one of the best-known brand names in America ── “Gore-Tex”, a plastic coating that makes clothing waterproof and windproof ── and even as it hired thousands of new workers and earned billions of dollars in annual sales, the company still has no bosses.
p.113
Bill Gore organized the company as though it were a bunch of car pools or task forces. He made sure each of the manufacturing plants and office buildings had 150 people at most, which kept things small enough so that everyone could get to know one another, learn what everyone else was working on, and discover who had the skills and knowledge to get something accomplished, whether they were trying to solve a problem or create a new product.
When I tell people that W. L. Gore has no bosses, they usually don't believe me, because the fact doesn't fit into their frames. Our thinking is still dominated by Theory X and the idea that large companies can operate only on the military command-and-control model. When people go to work at Gore, they're told how the place works, but it takes them a long time to grasp the reality.
That's what happened to Diane Davidson. Nothing in her 15 years of experience as a sales executive in the apparel industry prepared her for life in a company where there are no bosses or pyramids.
p.113
“When I arrived at Gore, I didn't know who did what”, she said. “I wondered how anything got done here. It was driving me crazy.” Like all new hires, Davidson was brought into the company by a “sponsor” who would serve as her mentor, not as her boss. The sponor would be there whenever she asked for advice but would never evaluate her performance or make decisions about her pay or give her assignments or orders. But she simply didn't know how to work without someone telling her what to do.
“Who's my boss?” she kept asking.
“Stop using the B-word”, her sponsor replied.
As an experienced executive, Davidson assumed that Gore's talk was typical corporate euphemism rather than actual practice.
p.114
“Secretly, there are bosses, right?” she asked.
There weren't. She eventually figured it out: “Your team is your boss, because you don't want to let them down. Everyone's your boss, and no one's yr boss.”
What's more, Davidson saw that people didn't fit into standardized job descriptions. They had all made different sets of “commitments” to their teams, often combining roles that remained segregated in different fiefdoms at conventional companies, such as sales, marketing, and product design. It took months for Davidson to get to know all her teammakes and what they did ── and for them to get to know her and offer her responsibilities. The “associates” at Gore all get to decide for themselves what new commitments they want to take on. Individuals could design their roles to fit their own interests and strengths. Everyone is supposed to be like an “amoeba” and take on a unique shape.
They aren't forced into preconceived boxes or standardized niches. At the end of the year a committee forms and reviews each associate's contribution and decides on salaries and bonuses, the same way it works at law firms.
p.114
Davidson's experience is typical at Gore. “You join a team and you're an idiot”, says John Morgan, who has switched new teams five times throughout a 25-year tenure. “It takes 18 months to build credibility. Early on, it's really frustrating. In hindsight, it makes sense. As a sponsor, I tell new hires, ‘Your job for the first six months is to get to know the team,’ but they have trouble believing it.”
Gore is the only major American company that has put Theory Y into full effect, and its results have been extraordinary.
pp.114-115
When Fortune publishes its ranking of the “best places to work in America”, Gore is always at the top of the list or very close to it.
Alan Deutschman, Change or die : the three keys to change at work and in life, 2007
____________________________________
Malcolm Gladwell., The tipping point: how little things can make a big difference, 2000, 2002
p.183
Crossing the 150 line is a small change that can make a big difference.
p.297
Gore associates, 183-187, 190-192
Gore-Tex apparel, 185
p.183
water-resistance Gore-Tex fabric, Glide dental floss, special insulating coatings for computer cables, a variety of sophisticated specialty cartridges, filter bags, tubes for the automobiles, semiconductor, pharmaceutical, and medical industries
p.184
Hutterites
Like them, he seems to have stumbled on the principle by trial and error.
“We found again and again that things get clumsy at a 150 (hundred and fifty),”
p.185
p.186
That's what Bill Gross was saying about his Hutterite community as well.
p.186
Jim Buckley, Gore
pp.183-187
p.183
Headquarters for the company is a low-slung, unpretentious red brick building.
The “executive” offices are small, plainly furnished rooms, along a narrow corridor. The corners of Gore buildings tend to be conference rooms or free space, so that no one can be said to have a more prestigious office.
p.183
When I visited a Gore associate named Bob Hen, at one of the company's plants in Delaware, I tried, unsuccessfully, to get him to tell me what his position was. I suspected, from the fact that he had been recommended to me, that he was one of the top executives. But his office wasn't any bigger than anyone else's.
p.184
Gore has managed to create a small-company ethos so infectious and sticky that it has survived their growth into a billion-dollar company with thousands of employees. And how did they do that? By (among other things) adhering to the Rule of 150.
pp.184-185
Like them, he seems to have stumbled on the principle by trial and error. “We found again and again that things get clumsy at a hundred and fifty”, he told an interviewer some years ago, so 150 employees per plant became the company goal. In the electronic division of the company, that means that no plant was built larger than 50,000 square feet, since there was almost no way to put many more than 150 people in a building that size.
p.185
“People used to ask me, how do you do your long-term planning”, Hen said. “And I'd say, that's easy, we put a hundred and fifty parking spaces in the lot, and when people start parking on the grass, we know it's time to build a new plant”. That new plant doesn't have to be far away. In Gore's home state of Deleware, for instance, the company has three plants within sight of each other. In fact, the company has fifteen plants within a twelve-mile radius in Delaware and Maryland. The building only have to be distinct enough to allow for an individual culture in each.
p.185
“We've found that a parking ot is a big gap between buildings”, one longtime associate, Burt Chase, told me. “You've go to pick yourself up and walk across the lot, and that's a big effort. That's almost as much effort as it takes to get in your car and drive five miles. There's a lot of independence in just having a separate building.” As Gore has grown in recent years, the company has undergone al almost constant process of division and redivision. Other companies would just keep adding additions to the main plant, or extend a production line, or double shifts. Gore tries to split up groups into smaller and smaller pieces. When I visited Gore, for example, they had just divided their Gore-Tex apparel business into two groups, in order to get under the 150 limit.
p.185
The more fashion-oriented consumer business of boots and backpacks and hiking gear was going off on its own, leaving behind the institutional business tha makes Gore-Tex uniforms for firefighters and soldiers.
p.186
Gore doesn't need formal management structures in its small plants ── it doesn't need the usual layers of middle and upper management ── because in groups that small, informal personal relationships are more effective.
p.186
“The pressure that comes to bear if we are not efficient at a plant, if we are not creating good earnings for the company, the peer pressure is unbelievable”, Jim Buckley, a long time associate of the firm, told me. “This is what you get when you have small teams, where everybody knows everybody. Peer pressure is much more powerful than a concept of a boss. Many, many times more powerful. People want to to live up to what is expected of them.”
p.186
In a larger, conventional-sized manufacturing plant, Buckley said, you might get the same kind of pressures. But they would work only within certain parts of the plant. The advantage of a Gore plant is that every part of the process for designing and making and marketing a given product is subject to the same group scrutiny.
pp.186-187
p.188
Perhaps most important, though, we store information with other people. Couples do this automatically.
p.188
Sure enough, the pairs who knew each other remembered substantially more items than those who didn't know each other. Wegner argues that when people know each other well, they create an implicit joint memory system ── a transitive memeory system ── which is based on an understanding about who is best suited to remember what kinds of thing.
pp.111-115
p.111
Gore-Tex
In the late 1950s one of Douglas MacGregor's speeches about Theory Y had a strong influence on a man named Wilbert L. Gore, who went by “Bill”.
Gore was an unlikely revolutionary. Forty-five years old, he was a somewhat nerdy, quiet, humble man who lived in a small house in Newark, Delaware.
He had worked for 17 years as a chemical engineer at DuPont, but he was frustrated by the “authoritarian” nature of large companies, which he felt smothered creativity.
p.112
He realized that the car pool was the only place where people talked to one another freely without regard for the chain of command. He also observed that when there was a crisis, the company created a task force and threw out the rules. It was the only time when organizations took risks and made actual breakthroughs.
Why, he wondered, should you have to wait for a crisis?
Why not just throw out the rules anyway?
And why not do away with hierarchy and ranks and titles while you're at it?
Why not create an organization where everyone could speak freely with anyone else?
p.112
Bill and his wife, Genevieve, who was known as “Vieve”, decided to start their own company. Many of their friends thought they were foolish.
They had five children to support, including two who were in college, and Bill was up for a big promotion to DuPont.
But they were motivated by creativity and achievement, not by security.
On January 1, 1958 ── their 23rd wedding anniversary ── they had dinner at home, and then Vieve said, “well, let's clear up the dishes and get to work.”
And that's how W. L. Gore & Associates was founded.
They mortgaged their house, withdrew four thousand dollars out of their saving, and raised extra capital from their bridge club.
Their first few coworkers lived in their basement, accepting room and board instead of salaries.
It's a classic story of an entrepreneurial venture in every way except one: Even as W. L. Gore grew tremendously over the years, and even as it created one of the best-known brand names in America ── “Gore-Tex”, a plastic coating that makes clothing waterproof and windproof ── and even as it hired thousands of new workers and earned billions of dollars in annual sales, the company still has no bosses.
p.113
Bill Gore organized the company as though it were a bunch of car pools or task forces. He made sure each of the manufacturing plants and office buildings had 150 people at most, which kept things small enough so that everyone could get to know one another, learn what everyone else was working on, and discover who had the skills and knowledge to get something accomplished, whether they were trying to solve a problem or create a new product.
When I tell people that W. L. Gore has no bosses, they usually don't believe me, because the fact doesn't fit into their frames. Our thinking is still dominated by Theory X and the idea that large companies can operate only on the military command-and-control model. When people go to work at Gore, they're told how the place works, but it takes them a long time to grasp the reality.
That's what happened to Diane Davidson. Nothing in her 15 years of experience as a sales executive in the apparel industry prepared her for life in a company where there are no bosses or pyramids.
p.113
“When I arrived at Gore, I didn't know who did what”, she said. “I wondered how anything got done here. It was driving me crazy.” Like all new hires, Davidson was brought into the company by a “sponsor” who would serve as her mentor, not as her boss. The sponor would be there whenever she asked for advice but would never evaluate her performance or make decisions about her pay or give her assignments or orders. But she simply didn't know how to work without someone telling her what to do.
“Who's my boss?” she kept asking.
“Stop using the B-word”, her sponsor replied.
As an experienced executive, Davidson assumed that Gore's talk was typical corporate euphemism rather than actual practice.
p.114
“Secretly, there are bosses, right?” she asked.
There weren't. She eventually figured it out: “Your team is your boss, because you don't want to let them down. Everyone's your boss, and no one's yr boss.”
What's more, Davidson saw that people didn't fit into standardized job descriptions. They had all made different sets of “commitments” to their teams, often combining roles that remained segregated in different fiefdoms at conventional companies, such as sales, marketing, and product design. It took months for Davidson to get to know all her teammakes and what they did ── and for them to get to know her and offer her responsibilities. The “associates” at Gore all get to decide for themselves what new commitments they want to take on. Individuals could design their roles to fit their own interests and strengths. Everyone is supposed to be like an “amoeba” and take on a unique shape.
They aren't forced into preconceived boxes or standardized niches. At the end of the year a committee forms and reviews each associate's contribution and decides on salaries and bonuses, the same way it works at law firms.
p.114
Davidson's experience is typical at Gore. “You join a team and you're an idiot”, says John Morgan, who has switched new teams five times throughout a 25-year tenure. “It takes 18 months to build credibility. Early on, it's really frustrating. In hindsight, it makes sense. As a sponsor, I tell new hires, ‘Your job for the first six months is to get to know the team,’ but they have trouble believing it.”
Gore is the only major American company that has put Theory Y into full effect, and its results have been extraordinary.
pp.114-115
When Fortune publishes its ranking of the “best places to work in America”, Gore is always at the top of the list or very close to it.
Alan Deutschman, Change or die : the three keys to change at work and in life, 2007
____________________________________
Malcolm Gladwell., The tipping point: how little things can make a big difference, 2000, 2002
p.183
Crossing the 150 line is a small change that can make a big difference.
p.297
Gore associates, 183-187, 190-192
Gore-Tex apparel, 185
p.183
water-resistance Gore-Tex fabric, Glide dental floss, special insulating coatings for computer cables, a variety of sophisticated specialty cartridges, filter bags, tubes for the automobiles, semiconductor, pharmaceutical, and medical industries
p.184
Hutterites
Like them, he seems to have stumbled on the principle by trial and error.
“We found again and again that things get clumsy at a 150 (hundred and fifty),”
p.185
p.186
That's what Bill Gross was saying about his Hutterite community as well.
p.186
Jim Buckley, Gore
pp.183-187
p.183
Headquarters for the company is a low-slung, unpretentious red brick building.
The “executive” offices are small, plainly furnished rooms, along a narrow corridor. The corners of Gore buildings tend to be conference rooms or free space, so that no one can be said to have a more prestigious office.
p.183
When I visited a Gore associate named Bob Hen, at one of the company's plants in Delaware, I tried, unsuccessfully, to get him to tell me what his position was. I suspected, from the fact that he had been recommended to me, that he was one of the top executives. But his office wasn't any bigger than anyone else's.
p.184
Gore has managed to create a small-company ethos so infectious and sticky that it has survived their growth into a billion-dollar company with thousands of employees. And how did they do that? By (among other things) adhering to the Rule of 150.
pp.184-185
Like them, he seems to have stumbled on the principle by trial and error. “We found again and again that things get clumsy at a hundred and fifty”, he told an interviewer some years ago, so 150 employees per plant became the company goal. In the electronic division of the company, that means that no plant was built larger than 50,000 square feet, since there was almost no way to put many more than 150 people in a building that size.
p.185
“People used to ask me, how do you do your long-term planning”, Hen said. “And I'd say, that's easy, we put a hundred and fifty parking spaces in the lot, and when people start parking on the grass, we know it's time to build a new plant”. That new plant doesn't have to be far away. In Gore's home state of Deleware, for instance, the company has three plants within sight of each other. In fact, the company has fifteen plants within a twelve-mile radius in Delaware and Maryland. The building only have to be distinct enough to allow for an individual culture in each.
p.185
“We've found that a parking ot is a big gap between buildings”, one longtime associate, Burt Chase, told me. “You've go to pick yourself up and walk across the lot, and that's a big effort. That's almost as much effort as it takes to get in your car and drive five miles. There's a lot of independence in just having a separate building.” As Gore has grown in recent years, the company has undergone al almost constant process of division and redivision. Other companies would just keep adding additions to the main plant, or extend a production line, or double shifts. Gore tries to split up groups into smaller and smaller pieces. When I visited Gore, for example, they had just divided their Gore-Tex apparel business into two groups, in order to get under the 150 limit.
p.185
The more fashion-oriented consumer business of boots and backpacks and hiking gear was going off on its own, leaving behind the institutional business tha makes Gore-Tex uniforms for firefighters and soldiers.
p.186
Gore doesn't need formal management structures in its small plants ── it doesn't need the usual layers of middle and upper management ── because in groups that small, informal personal relationships are more effective.
p.186
“The pressure that comes to bear if we are not efficient at a plant, if we are not creating good earnings for the company, the peer pressure is unbelievable”, Jim Buckley, a long time associate of the firm, told me. “This is what you get when you have small teams, where everybody knows everybody. Peer pressure is much more powerful than a concept of a boss. Many, many times more powerful. People want to to live up to what is expected of them.”
p.186
In a larger, conventional-sized manufacturing plant, Buckley said, you might get the same kind of pressures. But they would work only within certain parts of the plant. The advantage of a Gore plant is that every part of the process for designing and making and marketing a given product is subject to the same group scrutiny.
pp.186-187
p.188
Perhaps most important, though, we store information with other people. Couples do this automatically.
p.188
Sure enough, the pairs who knew each other remembered substantially more items than those who didn't know each other. Wegner argues that when people know each other well, they create an implicit joint memory system ── a transitive memeory system ── which is based on an understanding about who is best suited to remember what kinds of thing.
p.190
Daniel Wegner, University of Virginia psychologist
“When each person has group-acknowledged responsiblity for particular tasks and facts, greater efficiency is inevitable”, Wegner says. “Each domain handled by the fewest capable of doing so, and responsibility for the domains is continuous over time rather than intermittently assigned by circumstance.”
p.190
“It's not just do you know somebody. It's do you really know them well enough that you know their skills and abilities and passions. That's what you like, what you do, what you want to do, what you are truly good at. Not, are you a nice person.”
p.190
it's knowing someone well enough to know what they know, and knowing them well enough so that you can trust them to know things in their specialty. It's the re-creation, on an organization-wide level, of the kind of intimacy and trust that exists in a family.
p.191
“One of the immediate reactions we get when we talk to people is ‘Man, your system sounds chaotic. How in the devil can you do anything with no obvious authority?’ But it's no chaos. It isn't a problem”, Burt Chase said.
“It's the advantage of understanding people's strengths. It's knowing ── where can I get my best advice? And if you have some knowledge about people, you can do that.”
p.191
What Gore has created, in short, is an organized mechanism that makes it far easier for new ideas and information moving around the organization to tip ── to go from one person or one part of the group to entire group all at once. That's the advantage of adhering to the Rule of 150. You can exploit the bonds of memory and peer pressure.
(The tipping point: how little things can make a big difference / by Malcolm Gladwell., 1. social psychology., 2. contagion (social psychology), 3. causation.
4. context effects (psychology), HM1033.G53 2000, 302──dc21, originally published in hardcover by Little, Brown and Company, March 2000, first back bay paperback edition, January 2002, 2000, 2002, )
____________________________________
Peter Bevelin, Seeking wisdom : from Darwin to Munger, 3rd edition, 2003, 2005, 2007
pp.132-133
People's behavior may change when we change the scale of a group. What works well in a group of one size may not work at all in a group of another size.
Garrett Hardin illustrates this as he examines the religious Hutterite communities in the northwestern U.S.:
As a colony grows in size, te propensity of the individual to claim a share of production “according to his needs” increases, while his eagerness to work “according to his ability” diminishes. The effectiveness of the overseers (preachers or bosses) also diminishes. Then, as shrinking increases, those less inclined to “goof off” begin to envy the brotherhood of drones, whem they presently join.
p.133
The Hutterites learned that scale or the number of people in each decision unit is important. Up to 150 people per colony, the system can be managed by the force of shame. Above this size an appeal to conscience loses its effectiveness and individuals begin to need more than they contribute. Studies show that groups of about 150 individuals are common in clans of hunter-gatherers, and military units.
Peter Bevelin, Seeking wisdom : from Darwin to Munger, 3rd edition, 2003, 2005, 2007
____________________________________
<< look up rule of 150 and put the URLs here >>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
https://medium.com/@social_archi/dunbars-number-1a8d75b94576
https://www.textise.net/showText.aspx?strURL=https://medium.com/@social_archi/dunbars-number-1a8d75b94576
Hutterites
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutterites
Garrett Hardin
https://www.textise.net/showText.aspx?strURL=https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/til-2018-0028/html?lang=en#document-main-content
Instead, he simply envisioned indigenous lands as an unbounded wilderness placed at the disposal of frontiersmen. Though he eventually acknowledged the existence of managed commons, he had little interest in community rules pertaining to resource exploitation. For him, these were simply moral norms which inevitably became ineffective after a community reached a certain level of population. He also took economists to task for failing to include in their analysis the true environmental and social costs of public decisions. Still, the famous example of the indigenous people of Northeastern Quebec illustrates a shortcoming of his analysis: community members did not act in total isolation from each other. On the contrary, communal norms could prevent an overexploitation of resources or allow for the adoption of corrective measures.
(??) communal norms could prevent an overexploitation of resources or allow for the adoption of corrective measures. (??)
Hutterite communities
____________________________________
Peter Senge, Art Kleiner, Charlotte Roberts, Richard Ross, George Roth, Bryan Smith, The dance of change : the challenge of sustaining momentus in learning organizations, (a fifth discipline resource), 1999
pp.411─412
p.411
At W. L. Gore, the manufacturers of Gore-Tex, the vision of “Freedom”, led to a single minimal rule called the “waterline” principle. Employees envision their enterprise as a ship on which they all sail together. If someone occasionally bores an accidentally hole above the ship's waterline, it's not calamitous; after all, innovation organizations must make allowances for some mistakes. A hole below the waterline, however, could sink the ship. Therefore the waterline principle states that on “any action that might seriously harm the success, the reputation, or the survival of the enterprise, the associate will consult with appropriate associates who might share the responsibility of taking this action.” No other rule is necessary.
(The dance of change : the challenge of sustaining momentus in learning organizations / Peter M. Senge ... [et al.]., 1. organizational learning., 2. organizational change., HD58.82.D36 1999, 658.4'06─DC21, a fifth discipline resource, 1999)
____________________________________
An AnandTech Interview with Jim Keller: 'The Laziest Person at Tesla'
by Dr. Ian Cutress on June 17, 2021 12:20 PM EST
IC: Would you say that engineers need more people skills these days? Because everything is complex, everything has separate abstraction layers, and if you want to work between them you have to have the fundamentals down.
JK: Now here’s the fundamental truth, people aren't getting any smarter. So people can't continue to work across more and more things - that's just dumb. But you do have to build tools and organizations that support people's ability to do complicated things. The VAX 8800 team was 150 people. But the team that built the first or second processor at Apple, the first big custom core, was 150 people. Now, the CAD tools are unbelievably better, and we use 1000s of computers to do simulations, plus we have tools that could place and route 2 million gates versus 200. So something has changed radically, but the number of people an engineer might talk to in a given day didn't change at all. If you have an engineer talk to more than five people a day, they'll lose their mind. So, some things are really constant.
IC: If you have more than 100 people, you need to split into two abstraction layers?
JK: Exactly. There are reasons for that, like human beings are really good at tracking. Your inner circle of friends is like 10-20 people, it's like a close family, and then there is this kind of 50 to 100 depending on how it's organized, that you can keep track of. But above that, you read everybody outside your group of 100 people as semi-strangers. So you have to have some different contracts about how you do it. Like when we built Zen, we had 200 people, and half the team at the front end and half the team at the back end. The interface between them was defined, and they didn't really have to talk to each other about the details behind the contract. That was important. Now they got along pretty good and they worked together, but they didn't constantly have to go back and forth across that boundary.
source:
____________________________________
p.5
This book is about what happens when there's no one in charge. It's about what happens when there's no hierarchy. You'd think there would be disorder, even chaos. But in many arenas, a lack of traditional leadership is giving rise to powerful groups that are turning industry and society upside down.
In short, there's a revolution raging all around us.
pp.6-7
Decentralization has been lying around for thousands of years.
p.7
The absence of structure, leadership, and formal organization, once considered a weakness, has become a major asset. Seemingly chaotic groups have challenged and defeated established institutions. The rules of the game have changed.
p.37
The one thing that does remain constant is the recovery principle--the famous twelve steps. Because there is no one in charge, everyone is responsible for keeping themselves--and everyone else--track. Even seniority doesn't matter that much: you're always an alcoholic. You have a sponsor, like a Nant'an, but the sponsor doesn't lead by coercion; that person leads by example. And if you mess up and relapse or stop attending for a while, you're always welcome to come back. There's no application form, and nobody owns AA.
p.37
And if you mess up and relapse or stop attending for a while, you're always welcome to come back.
p.37
Members have always been able to directly help each other without asking permission or getting approval from Bill W. or anyone else. This quality enables open system to quickly adapt and respond.
p.42
We'll see this pattern repeat itself across different sectors and in different industries. We call this radical swing “the accordion principle”. Over time, industries swing from being decentralized to centralized to decentralized and back again. In response to overcentralized industries or institutions, people rebel and create open starfish systems.
p.42
At the extreme of decentralization, we encounter a gray zone where a very loose collection of people have a surprising amount of power.
p.45
6th principle of decentralization: as industries become decentralized, overall profits decrease. Introduce starfish into the equation and wave good-bye to high profits. ([ profits is decentralized; being a decentralized starfish there is less ability to form a consortium to pool purchasing power to negotiate a better term ])
p.47
AA is found wherever a group of members chooses to meet.
p.65
Craig responded: “The way craigslist runs is that people who use it post, and if they find something inappropriate they flag it for approval. So in a very day-to-day kind of way, the people who use the site run it. Also, in terms of policy, the categories we have almost 100 percent were generated by the people in the community. We tried to figure out what people were asking for, what was the consensus--what really worked--and we moved on that. I think that the initial idea over 10-plus years was mine. The rest of it was just listening to people and providing the infrastructure to that. Another thing is a culture of trust that works out really well.”
Craig is right: there is sense of trust on the site.
p.71
It was just like the Nant'an: you follow someone--in this case, use their patch--because you respect their skills and you like the results you get, not because the boss told you to.
p.71
If your patches improved the original software in any way, and if enough people liked them, they would eventually be integrated into the main program.
p.87
Quaker meetings began in silence, and whichever congregant was moved to do so spoke for as long as he or she wanted. They believed that all people have an “inner light” and should be treated as equals, and they were therefore staunch opponents of slavery.
pp.88-101
LEG 1: Circles
The only way for outsiders to join a circle, in fact, was to be taken in battle. But once brought into a circle, members were accepted as Apache--whether by birth, adoption, or capture. That's the thing about circles: once you join, you're an equal. It's then up to you to contribute to the best of your ability.
As the norms of a circle develop, and as members spend more time together, something fascinating happens: they begin to trust one another.
LEG 2: The Catalyst
The thing is, ammonia doesn't have any iron in it--it's made solely of hydrogen and nitrogen. The iron in this equation remains unchanged: it just facilitates the bonding of hydrogen and nitrogen in a certain way.
Iron is a catalyst. In chemistry, a catalyst is any element or compound that initiates a reaction without fusing into that reaction.
The catalyst is an inspirational figure who spurs others to action. Circles don't form on their own.
A catalyst develops an idea, shares it with others, and leads by example.
A catalyst is like the architect of a house: he's essential to the long-term structural integrity, but he doesn't move in.
He wasn't interested in creating an empire under his control; he was focused on sparking a movement to end slavery.
LEG 3: Ideology
Ideology is the glue that holds decentralized organization together.
The Apaches held a common belief that they belonged on the land and deserved to be self-governing. Those few Apaches who didn't hold this ideology accepted the Spanish invitation to become farmers and integrate into a centralized system. But those who stayed with the tribe held firmly to the notion of independence. Anyone who interfered with that ideology--whether a Spaniard, a Mexican, or an American--became the enemy. The Apaches held to their ideology so strongly that they were willing to fight and sacrifice themselves for their cause.
LEG 4: The Preexisting Network
The Quakers
the Quakers gave the movement a platform
Third, and most important, centralized organizations aren't set up to launch decentralized movements.
... slowly gained their trust and friendship.
LEG 5: The Champion
A champion is relentless in promoting a new idea.
Leor Jacobi
Just ask the folks at the Berkeley post office in California--they're still talking about Leor Jacobi.
Something about the way Leor spoke--his excitement or his charm--made everyone feel comfortable with him and interested in what he had to say.
Champions are inherently hyperactive.
p.89
On the other hand, when circles take on more than 14 or so members, the bond breaks down. Members become more anonymous, and that opens the door to free-riding or destructive behavior. No longer does everyone have to pull their weight.
p.90
Being in the physical presence of other participants adds a dimension of closeness, and a sense of ownership emerges.
p.90
You own the experience and develop a sense of responsibility and belonging.
p.90
Instead of rules, they depend on norms.
p.113
Deborah Alvarez-Rodriguez
Deborah had a crazy idea: take all the advocacy groups that were normally a thorn in the city's side and open her office doors to them, inviting them in.
p.113
Working side by side, people began to trust each other.
p.113
She'd refuse to talk to organizations about concrete strategy and nuts and bolts. She'd tell them, “I'm not going to talk about programs or budgets. I'm not going to talk about any of that right now.” Instead, she asked the groups about “what keeps you up at night, what brings joy--tears of joy in your eyes. And I'll share that with you as well. I want to understand you as a person.” A catalyst's most important relationships are based on trust and understanding. Deborah “just knew that values were a stronger binding force than authority”. These conversations were difficult at first. “It was a little bit scary for everybody. It was a little bit scary for me. It required me to have a certain amount of vulnerability as a leader.”
p.114
Imagine having so much faith and trust in a community that you'd continue talking to them, let alone respecting them, after they'd burned your effigy.
p.128
To a catalyst, emotional connections come first. Once there's an emotional connection, then and only then is it time to brainstorm and talk strategy.
p.141
Nairobi, Kibera slum, Africa
The living conditions in Kibera are so harsh that the average life span is 38 years--and dropping.
p.141
We went inside several of these homes and for the first time in our lives fully realized what it's like to have absolutely nothing.
p.145
Ingrid Munro, a Swedish UN housing worker
Mama Ingrid
Jamii Bora Trust
p.152
the Americans gave the Nant'ans cattle:
p.152
The cows changed everything.
p.153
What cows were to the Apache, book sales became to AA.
pp.162-163
Pierre Omidyar
But then along came Pierre Omidyar, a computer programmer whose fiancée couldn't find anyplace to buy her favorite collectible, Pez dispensers. Like Shawn Fanning, the creator of Napster, Omidyar took matters into his own hands, never realizing the massive force he was about to unleash. The service, originally called “AuctionWeb” but soon renamed “eBay”, at first glance appeared similar on Onsale. But eBay had what seemed like a radical idea at the time. It allowed users to sell items directly to each other. It never took control of inventory and never served as an intermediary. After all, there was really no need to have a money-back guarantee for Pez dispensers.
p.163
p.164
Representing the first of two types of hybrid organizations, eBay is a centralized company that decentralized the customer experience.
pp.164-165
A hybrid approach led to eBay's success, but it also created tensions. People are willing to trust one another when it comes to user rating, but in other situations they want the safeguards that are possible only with a command-and-control structure.
p.165
PayPal allows users to transfer funds to one another via a trusted intermediary.
p.165
“If you were to tell someone at PayPal that people are basically good, they'd laugh in your face. We've seen too many shenanigans.”
p.172
Because it depends on community input, the more people use Google, the more accurate it gets.
Because it depends on community input, the more people use Google, the more accurate it [should] gets.
Because it depends on community input, the more people use Google, the more accurate it [should] gets, [if that's how the algorithm works, meaning the more the users search, the more relevant (approriate (relating to the matter at hand)) the next search result should be; and then there is the stage (point) of diminishing return by demography, by life state, by category, by geography, by climate zone, by news media, by access to the Internetworking infrastructure, by electricity; ... ].
p.184
management is a function and a responsibility rather than a rank and privilege.
p.210
Ori Brafman
The stark differences between the Apache and Spanish approaches to battle proved a helpful historical model understanding the challenges facing military tacticians today.
And that's exactly it. Once you're familiar with starfish concepts, it's hard not to see the patterns play out everywhere you look.
p.211
Rod A. Beckstrom
1) interest in social network and all other forms of decentralized networks
p.216
Tom Nevins discusses decentralized features of the Apache in the introduction to Helge Ingstad, The Apache Indians: In Search of the Missing Tribe (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004). We learned more about how the Apaches survived against the Spanish when we interviewed Nevins ourselves. He described how decentralized elements still define the Apaches. For instance, Nevins shared with us his observation that coming-of-age ceremonies for young women further decentralize Apache ties because new, flat connections between the young woman's family and other clans emerge. He also explained that the Apaches use a gift economy in which all members of a clan, including visitors such as Nevins, are expected to share resources.
One fascinating book about the clash of cultures between Southwest American Indians and white settlers is Scott Zesch, The Captured: A True Story of Abduction by Indians on the Texas Frontier (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2004). Zesch's own ancestor was kidnapped as a child by a Native American group.
p.220
David Cooperrider
Appreciative Inquiry, 1999
Appreciative Inquiry Handbook, 2004
edited by Daniel L. Cooperrider and Jane E. Dutton, Organizational Dimensions of Global Change, 1999
p.220
Peter Drucker, Concept of the Corporation, 1972, pp.xxiv, 61, where he explains the key decentralized features and power structure at GM.
p.220
Peter Drucker, The Frontiers of Management, 1986, pp.220-21, 224.
p.220
Charles O'Reilly, 1998 business case “New United Motors Manufacturing, Inc. (NUMMI),” for the board of trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University
(Brafman, Ori, The starfish and the spider : the unstoppable power of leaderless organization / Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom., 1. decentralization in management., 2. organization behavior., 3. success in business., 2006, )
____________________________________
