A day or two ago I read a HBR Blog Network post entitled “What Peter Drucker Knew About 2020” by Rick Wartzman (@RWartzman) of the Drucker Institute. I noted the following paragraph:
Drucker urged executives to push decision-making and accountability all the way down through the organization as early as 1954, when he introduced the concept of Management by Objectives. And yet there is ample evidence that most organizations remain paragons of command-and-control. In a knowledge economy, top-down direction is particularly detrimental because employees are bound to know more than their supervisors do about the specialized fields in which they operate. They may also know more about the customer—his needs and desires. “Knowledge workers have to manage themselves,” Drucker advised. “They have to have autonomy.”
Shortly thereafter I read a CNET post entitled “Google is ‘on the right side of history’ says Eric Schmidt” by Rich Trenholm (@rich_trenholm). Schmidt touches on several topics but he must have been channeling Drucker as he noted the following:
Schmidt recalls “the moment I discovered I wasn’t in a normal company.” Early in his time at Google he discussed a review of engineering performance with founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. “I looked at it and said that makes sense to me, but then Larry and Sergey looked at it and said, ‘None of this is true.'” In fact, Page and Brin had been keeping an eye on what people were doing on an ongoing basis and so concluded that the company’s managers didn’t know what was going on. Their solution? Get rid of all the managers.
Known as “the disorg,” this process found the managers roles that suited them better, leaving Google with with just one manager in charge of 120 people…a number big enough so that he couldn’t wind up micromanaging each individual.
The company quickly found that with no management but a clear strategy, people would self-manage. One result was a new algorithm that fixed irrelevant ads showing up in search results — developed not by the ads team but by a few engineers figuring it out “when they had nothing to do one weekend.”