Organizations & Hiring
Designing the organization, making the key hires, running the hiring process. Worked through with cases and models.
- 01Motivation is a design decision5 min
Self-determination theory: autonomy, competence, relatedness. Each maps to a design decision: reporting lines, grade ladder, team size. Motivation is drawn.
- 02Add people, and each one pulls less5 min
The Ringelmann effect: eight on a rope pull half of what they would alone. Coordination loss plus motivation loss. The fix: one owner per module.
- 03Your bilingual staff are not translators5 min
Weak ties and structural holes: value sits in the gaps. Multilingual staff stand on the biggest hole, between HQ and local. Give it a formal position.
- 04Don't run a startup-stage entity like head office6 min
Mintzberg's configurations coordinate differently. HQ is a machine bureaucracy; a new entity is a simple structure. Impose one on the other and it suffocates.
- 05Fifty meters apart, conversations stop5 min
The Allen curve: contact falls steeply with distance; past 50 meters it equals another building. It still holds remotely. Seating is organizational design.
- 06The favor ledger is more honest than the org chart5 min
Mauss's The Gift: give, receive, repay. Japan's favor ledger is this mechanism, unwritten but tracked by all. Who owes whom explains more than the org chart.
- 075, 15, 50, 150: when to redraw the org chart5 min
Dunbar's number is a sequence: 5, 15, 50, 150. At each step, how relationships hold changes. A Japan entity growing to 150 redraws its chart three times.
- 08Conway's law: draw the team before the product5 min
Conway's law: a system copies the communication structure that built it. In Japan, run it backwards: decide the product shape, then draw the team.
- 09Four kinds of relationships, and why pay design goes wrong5 min
Fiske's four relational models: communal, ranking, equality, market. All four exist in one company. Pay fails when one relationship's rules are used in another.
- 10Why global matrix structures break in Japan5 min
Nakane: Japanese group by place, not qualification. Global functional lines pull people out of their place. Fix the place first, draw lines after.