Coordination | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

I’m a bottleneck…but I try to improve

May 9, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

I wrote “I”…as I could I written “us”, “you”… a little story that’s, of course, imaginary. Any similarity whith any existing situation or people is accidental.

Finally, I did it well. Slowly, step by step, I climbed up the company’s hierarchy and took more and more responsabilities.

Today, I’m managing a large team. I’m responsible for my team’s results so I take care of everyhting and do my best to keep everything under control. Nothing is done without my approval. And nothing can happen if I’m not informed. As time went by I become a little less directive, more mature. I know that giving orders and setting objectives is not enough. So I’m trying to do make myself avaible to help my staff, to help them to carry on.

I also have many internal responsabilities. On many strategic fields, nothing is done without consulting me. I’m involved in many internal think tanks, advisory groups. The company does nothing until such a group has spent a long time thinking about what has to be done and how.

I don’t even mention the relations with key clients and partners, which is my exclusive domain.

That’s not easy everyday. The people I’m in contact with are as busy as me. It’s very hard to find a moment to discuss together, to make the decisions that break deadlocks. And this can’t be done by email. It’s even worth with internal meetings, because we have to deal with the schedules of sometimes ten or fifteen very busy people. What a pity : most of times, only five are really active, the other being a part of the decorum. Sometimes I’m one of the five. Sometimes I wonder what I’m doing there. A short report would be enough, just to let me know what has been said and decided.

In short : I’m responsible and essential. Nothing can be done without me. So you can imagine how much money my company makes thanks to me.

Humm… I have to admit that sometimes I’m doubtful.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Management & HR Tagged With: bottlenecks, coordination, email, enterprise, management, organization, productivity

External social networks are not only for marketing purposes

January 21, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Generally, when I talk about social networks for other people than employees, I’m answered “ah ? I thought you were not interested in all these marketing things”. This is the obvious proof that, for many people and many companies, when you aim at an external audiance it’s for communication and sale purpose, following a one way flow. Said differently : “outside we talk, inside we work and both have nothing in common”. Seen with a little distance it embodies the idea according to which it’s the company that condition its environment and not the opposite.

Preconceived ideas that were true at a given moment but shows we are now entering a new era.

Can enterprises organize themselves as markets

January 17, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 3 Comments

What’s a market ? It’s a place when offer meets demand.

Companies love markets because it’s the more efficient way to find outlets for their products and identify suppliers. It’s a competitiveness factor because of the outlets it provides and the optimization of costs that competition makes possible.

The “social” web is a market somehow. Contents can find an audience, ideas outlets, projects people who’ll make them become real, people partners, question answers. It’s because of this market that events as trivial as flashmobs happened, that some people had great carriers evolutions, that some companies where born. This huge self-organized space made possible things that would not have been in a classical, organized, regulated market, operation costs making it irrational the organization of niche micro-markets. It’s because it has no physical nor economic barriers that the web made all this possible : intermediation and transaction costs are near to zero.

There is another place that is full of ideas, projects, needs, competences, longings, question, which would gain a lot if the ones were able to meet the others within its walls : the enterprise.

Experience showed me this is definitively the place where exist the more questions and answers, and the place where we can be sure there are very few chances that the ones meet the others. Companies are traditionnally, on this point of view, the place for misses opportunities. It may sound surprising according to all the things companies do, to all their obvious successes, but when looking at what they don’t or painfully do and would make sense, it may makes us feel dizzy. A kind of vertigo that is proportional with the size of the enterprise. Are there any reason to that ? Of course : high transaction and intermediation costs and the fact companies don’t want to give intermediation up.

The power of decentralized crisis management : the Gustav case

September 1, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Crisis is charaterized by its suddenty, its unpredictability and the gravity of its possible consequences. It forces organization to react quickly in order to protect itself as well at its components and agents.

That implies many things. Decide on the way to react, which suppose to have reliable and exhaustive information. Then manage to deliver orders, which means to be sure everybody will be able to receive an accurate top down information flow. And, as we can expect either the ascending or descending flow won’t work, making it impossible to make the right decisions or to enforce them, cross flows are needed in order to help people to coordinate themselves on their own.

All of that is about twho phenomenons I wrote about earlier : the fact a networked organization is less fragile than a centralized one (read here for the Toyota and al Qaida cases) and the need for an increased visibility on everyone’s activities and informations in order everyone can adapt its own strategy to the other’s without any central coordination.

I’m sure than everybody, by observation or experience, has the remembering of a crisis situation where no one knew what to to, everybody lacked informations about what what was happening and this lack prevented people from making the right decisions, either at the top or at the bottom of the organization.

By the way…do you know Gustav?

I’m a bottleneck…but I try to improve

Subscribe to this bog

Tag cloud

Happy to work at…

Favorite books

Copyright